We don't normally think of Bach -- whose music is felt to have been touched by a divine spirit and always displayed transcendent intellect -- as a rite of spring. But as musicologists and early music specialists never tire in pointing out, dance is the motor that drove much Baroque music, and Bach was no exception.
Born March 21, he was, in fact, a son of spring. Nor did his music lack a spring in its step, and that was particularly the case with the flamboyant concertos he dedicated in hot- house flowery prose to the Margrave of Brandenburg on an early spring day in 1721. And so in a concert on the vernal equinox, Friday, a sense of both history and renewal was strongly in the air when the Academy of Ancient Music played Bach's six “Brandenburg" Concertos at the Rene and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa.
The AAM prides itself on being up-to-date early musikers. The instruments are old, but the ethos is new. You can, for instance, join the chorus of celebrators of its energized new recording of the “Brandenburgs," terrifically recorded in the latest multi-channel Super Audio CD sound, on the ensemble’s Facebook page.
Founded in London in 1973 by harpsichordist Christopher Hogwood, AAM had within three years become a big enough hit to tour such places as Egypt, India and Sri Lanka. The good-humored harpsichordist Richard Egarr became music director in 2005, and the AAM remains as lively as ever.
But there is another history that can be found on the indispensable long list of links to articles on early music on the ensemble's website. A history of the AAM by William Weber describes the original ensemble having begun in 1726, when the “Brandenburgs" were new music, and lasting through the end of the 18th century. “As for that indefatigable Society, the Gropers into Antique Musick," we learn from a commentary of the time, these “Philharmonick Spiders" may have been “dress'd up in Cobwebs and powdered with Dust," as they examined old music. But from them came “Harmony in an Uproar."
And true to the ancient Academy of Ancient Music, there was in the dusting off of these “Brandenburgs" of old in Segerstrom just that -- harmony in a great and marvelous uproar.
