In Oregon Music News, you'll find my review of Bach & Friends, a new DVD that features stellar performances by the likes of Joshua Bell, Hillary Hahn, Richard Stolzman, the Emerson String Quartet, and interweaves these performances with their testimony to the greatness of Bach's music. Bach & Friends is a terrific DVD that I can recommend wholeheartedly.
Also, in doing some research about Bach, I found this amazing quote in Paul Griffiths' "The Penguin Companion to Classical Music" on Bach's music.
"It is, in particular, music that teaches. It contains, within itself, all the information necessary for its understanding, and travellers have found that, where Beethoven or Chopin mean little in West Africa or Indonesia, a Bach invention is instantly recognized for what it is and enjoyed. In his cantatas, Bach set a fair bit of the Bible to music - the Bible as translated by Luther, who was born in the same region little more than two centuries before. But he also created a many-chaptered bible of his own, treating the miracles of tonality and harmony, of melodic shapes and their relationships, of regular metres and all these in counterpoint. He dedicated his life to the glory of God, and to the divinity that exists in sound."
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