YOUR SAY
CHOPIN Vs VERDI
Mozarts music makes me forget the entire world and makes me want to sail across continents and gives me a feeling to fly to heaven and Back.
Francine Stock presents this compelling programme which asks: who is the most visionary classical composer from the Baroque era? This episode pits JS Bach against GF Handel. Together, Handel and Bach encapsulate two different sides of human existence, for where Handel wrote for the people, Bach wrote for God. Comedian Tim Minchin puts forward a case for Bach as the composer of the mind and the spirit, while actor and comedian, Alexander Armstrong, explains how Handel wrote insightfully about the earth and the extraordinary situations in which people find themselves.
HANDEL
George Frideric Handel (Friday, 23 February 1685 – Saturday, 14 April 1759) was a German-born Baroque composer who is famous for his operas, oratorios and concerti grossi. Born as Georg Friedrich Händel in Halle, he spent most of his adult life in England, becoming a subject of the British crown on 22 January 1727. His most famous works are Messiah, an oratorio set to texts from the King James Bible; Water Music; and Music for the Royal Fireworks. Strongly influenced by the techniques of the great composers of the Italian Baroque and the English composer Henry Purcell, his music was known to many significant composers who came after him, including Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.
Advocate
Alexander Armstrong
Alexander Armstrong is one of Britain's best known comedians. Now also a serious actor, Armstrong's early years were spent training his voice as a singer. A member of Trinity College's choir in Cambridge, Armstrong is a bass singer and while he chose instead to pursue a career in comedy, it is this grounding in classical music that made Alexander the perfect advocate on Handel for the Visionaries series.
BACH
Johann Sebastian Bach (31 March [O.S. 21 March] 1685 – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity. Although he introduced no new forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust contrapuntal technique, an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organisation in composition for diverse musical forces, and the adaptation of rhythms and textures from abroad, particularly Italy and France.
Revered for their intellectual depth and technical and artistic beauty, Bach's works include the Brandenburg concertos; the Goldberg Variations; the English Suites, French Suites, Partitas, and Well-Tempered Clavier; the Mass in B Minor; the St. Matthew Passion; the St. John Passion; The Musical Offering; The Art of Fugue; the Sonatas and Partitas for violin solo; the Cello Suites; more than 200 surviving cantatas; and a similar number of organ works, including the celebrated Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.
While Bach's fame as an organist was great during his lifetime, he was not particularly well-known as a composer. His adherence to Baroque forms and contrapuntal style was considered "old-fashioned" by his contemporaries, especially late in his career when the musical fashion tended towards Rococo and later Classical styles. A revival of interest and performances of his music began early in the 19th century, and he is now widely considered to be one of the greatest composers in the Western tradition.
Advocate
Tim Minchin
Australian comic, Tim Minchin burst onto comedy radar when he won the best new comic Perrier award in 2005 at the Edinburgh festival. He has since won the Best Alternative Comedian award at the HBO US Comedy Arts festival in 2007. His musical training and theatrical performance the 2006 Perth Theatre Company production of Amadeus made him a natural choice to be an advocate for this series of Visionaries.
VIGNETTES
