The 2023 Bach Festival opened on Friday at the Maison symphonique with a highly original concert of works from little-performed sons of the great Jean-Sébastien. Before the break Johann Christian and after the break Johann Christoph Friedrich, whose conductor Reinhard Goebel tells us that the nickname was Fritz. The music of the two cadets is especially reminiscent of Haydn and the young Mozart.
We were a long way from Bach Sr. with these two offspring who had only one thing in mind: cutting the musical umbilical cord with Dad. A father that Fritz knew for 18 years and Johann Christian for 15 years. If we refer to what Reinhard Goebel told in the columns of Duty last Saturday, we would have on one side Johann Christian, a London resident, who foresees the music of the future, as it will be made in Vienna with Haydn and Mozart and on the other side Fritz, the dull one, buried in a hole lost in the north of Germany and who, late in life, will, like a boomerang, feel from Vienna the scent of music more or less influenced by his brother, even though the latter has been dead for 10 years.
In other words the first part of the concert offered us a symphony from 1770 and a concerto from 1774 by Johann Christian, dates corresponding to Mozart’s adolescence, and which sounded like Mozart genre 25th Or 29th Symphonies (1773/74). The second part allowed us to hear Fritz from 1792 and 1794, years 1 and 3 years after Mozart’s death, but music from a mind to which the brain of adolescent Mozart seemed to have been transplanted… if I may forgive you this joke.
Accumulation
In fact, evoking Mozart is an image, because it is a Mozart without grace. We could talk about Haydn, but it would be Haydn without the humor. Fritz’s trace of originality is a great melodic oboe duet in the Concerto grosso for piano by Fritz. But it’s a bit silly for a piano concerto. More amusing: the slowed-down entry of the same piano in the first part. The quality of his brother is obviously to anticipate classicism.
Reinhard Goebel has a lot of fun delving into these forgotten repertoires, sometimes more or less lost, and the concert is not unpleasant. We admire the limpid and luminous Schaghajegh Nosrati for having memorized these avalanches of sixteenth notes and for having given them so much importance. But does what is a powerfully satisfying intellectual pleasure (the internal logic of the program) for the researcher, the musicologist and the performer become an exhilarating evening for the music lover? We very much doubt it.
The concert, very well presented by the Festival Orchestra, made for a wonderful ephemeral evening. Its only problem was the accumulation, the piling up of discoveries: just one of these works would have been enough, for example the Symphony by Fritz. Come on, let’s go through two: Symphony of Fritz and the Concerto by Johann Christian, or the other way around. But let us be given a little bit of “real business” on the side. If we look for a descendant of this music we will find it very indirectly in that of the young Mendelssohn who similarly strings notes every kilometer which enters one ear and exits another.
Let’s put it into perspective: it was certainly not a Plan 9 from Outer Space musical, but – and we exclude the Symphony of Johann Christian which, for 1770, is very solid – we said to ourselves several times during the evening that for once there was not only the forceps filling of quotas of diversity which could make us waste our time with nonsense which deprived us of the programming of true musical masterpieces.