The master's works: JS Bach
We Bacholaters have waited a long time for it, but finally our day has come. Five timpani punches at 7pm this evening will declare what all sensible folk have known for years: there's no music but Bach.
You'll forgive the exaggaration, of course, or at least put it down to overexcitement about BBC Radio 3's A Bach Christmas, the 10-day marathon event starting tonight. It sees the complete works going out on the airwaves between now and Christmas Day.
That's right: tune in attentively - no nodding at the back - and you'll have the opportunity to hear every single note penned by the great JSB before your turkey has so much as congealed on the table (or, if you're eating at mine, before it's actually made it into the oven). Even better, he won't be diluted by the work of feeble amateurs - Mozart, say, or Jamie Cullum.
That's 214 hours' worth, apparently. And, yes, that includes all 209 cantatas, most of them produced almost as rapidly by Bach himself during a fruitful but punishing few years in Leipzig. Rumours that this underexplored corner of Bach's output would be squeezed into graveyard slots, while most sensible mortals are slumbering, have proved to be unfounded: the Beeb will be getting stuck into its first, the typically cheery Ich Steh mit einem Fuss in Grabe (My Open Grave I see before me), BWV156, a little after 11pm. If 18 tightly packed pages of print doesn't fry your head, you can download the full schedule here (PDF). They're even keeping a Bach blog. How good is that?
Tempting though it is to claim that Radio 3 have simply listened to what I've been yelling for years - it's just not worth listening to other music! - the Bach Christmas project comes after a highly successful experiment with Beethoven last summer. This saw the network's schedules cleared for a week of Beethovenian excess with over a million punters downloading specially recorded versions of the symphonies, something that didn't exactly endear the BBC to the curmudgeonly record industry.
But back to Bach. The BBC is running plenty of other activities alongside the broadcast, among them the delightfully potty notion that people across the UK should book their local church and get their fingers around that most famous organ work of all, the D minor Toccata and Fugue (not, in fact, written for the organ, but you knew that already).
Organists nervously cracking their knuckles at the prospect of a gala performance in front of friends and family should at least be grateful the BBC hasn't managed yet to bring the composer back from the dead: he was so talented at the instrument, it's said, that a hapless soul who attempted to rival him at the keyboard simply ran away in terror when he heard the great man warming up.
Anyway, like the freak that I am, I've popped the cork early by sneaking some headphones into work and getting stuck into the Christmas Oratorio. (Midway through the third cantata at the moment. Sublime, since you ask.) Much as you're itching to do the same, you might not be able to quite yet, so we've made the specialest of special reports devoted to the work of the master.
As well as an insightful biography by Bach scholar John Butt and an interview with John Eliot Gardiner, both published in our G2 special earlier this week, we have an exclusive listening guide courtesy of the editors of the Rough Guide to Classical Music. They've put together the 10 Bach discs every self-respecting human needs to own - so if you're yet to be bitten by Bach, this is the place to begin. See you on the other side.
