This Week in Classical Music-July 18, 2010

by: Randy Kinkel

July 19, 2010

Charles MacKerras

( Phoenix, AZ )
•MacKerras Dies
•Bach's 2nd Suite for... Oboe?

This Week in Classical Music 7/18/2010

It’s This week in Classical Music, an update on what’s happening in the classical music world; I’m Randy Kinkel.
Conductor Charles MacKerras has died in London. In a long career he conducted some of the world's leading orchestras and was the former director of music at English National Opera. He grew up in Australia, but spent much of his working life in Britain after moving there in 1947. Sir Charles once said, “I always wanted to become a musician. I was hardly interested in anything else. From about eight or nine I had a sort of mania about it," He studied in Prague and was an authority on both Czech music, particularly Janácek, and Mozart, and he pioneered performances using period instruments. Over his career he conducted more than 30 operas by 15 different composers at the Royal Opera House; Roy McEwan, managing director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, said: "Sir Charles was one of the most distinguished conductors of his generation. He had an almost unparalleled mastery of music across a huge range of styles and periods from Handel through Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak and Janacek and beyond". MacKerras was 85.
Juilliard Faculty member Gonzalo Ruiz set out to transpose some of Bach’s flute music for his own instrument, the Oboe—but in the process, he just might have uncovered Bach’s original version of the Orchestral Suite #2. Among the baroque composer’s four orchestral suites, —only the first has survived in what's likely its original form. The others are re-worked versions of lost originals. Experts think the second suite in B minor descended from an original work in a minor, transposed and copied by Bach and assistants for another occasion. In performance, not only did Ruiz's transposition fit the oboe, the revision appeared to answer some musical questions that had puzzled scholars for centuries. Performing it in a minor is much more comfortable for the accompanying string instruments to play, and allows the unique tone of the oboe to be heard above the strings—the most common texture in Baroque orchestral music. He later found one of Bach's own oboe-to-flute transcriptions showed the same patterns he found in the suite. Oboist Ruiz goes on to say, “in Bach's time, the oboe was considered to be the electric guitar of the 18th century, truly a virtuosic vehicle in the right hands. I hope this stretches expectations of the Baroque oboe."

For more on these and other items and events, go to the website, kbaq.org; find us on Facebook and Twitter, be listening each week at this time for another update; and join me every weekday at noon for The Mozart Buffet, an hour of music by Mozart and his contemporaries. I’m Randy Kinkel for “This week in Classical Music” on 89.5 KBAQ Phoenix, a service of Rio Salado College and Arizona State University.

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