The Swingle Singers
      Bach Hits Bach

* Vocal arrangements of works by J. S. Bach

The Swingle Singers
Virgin CDC 5 45049 2 Total time: 53:31

Summary for the Busy Executive: Doo-bee plus doooo.

If you go to Amazon.com for listeners' comments, you'll find one that says,
essentially, if you buy this CD, you have no taste.  And that's all it does
say.  It offers no reason why the mere act of buying this CD bars you from
the Temple of True Beauty.  After all, those with taste already know why.
Over the years, I've gotten the feeling that a lot of listeners, including
some very fine musicians, think the Swingle Singers were mere Yannis or
Teshes, that what they did was undeservedly easy.  I've been a choral
singer for a very long time, with repertoire that includes the likes of
Schoenberg, Webern, Ligeti, Brahms, Mahler, and real Bach.  I consider
myself to have some appreciation of what it takes to pull off a choral
performance.  As far as I can tell, the Swingle Singers cleared two very
high hurdles.

First, at least originally, their repertoire consisted exclusively of
Bach instrumental works.  Most of the time, one can't simply assign a voice
to a part and just wail from the score.  Aside from the obvious problem
that instruments have a wider range than the human voice, one encounters
the more subtle problems of how to assign a single line among various
parts and how to achieve a pure instrumental effect vocally.  Probably the
most extreme example of Ward Swingle's ability to do this comes from his
arrangement of C.  P.  E.  Bach's largely unison keyboard "Solfeggietto,"
from the album Going Baroque - fifty-four seconds of riding the lightning
- where hardly anybody gets more than a beat's worth of consecutive notes
before an interruption from somebody else.  The original Singers considered
this the hardest thing they did.  But all the arrangements required more
than trivial skills.  In aid of clarity and lightness, Swingle chose even
his scat syllables carefully.  Anyone who thinks these singers merely go
"doo-bee doo" really aren't listening.  I've sung many "Swingle-like"
arrangements of Bach, and most of these many are goddamn awful - too thick,
too silly, and about as close to the original as "Our Love" is to Romeo and
Juliet.  Ward Swingle's arrangements were little miracles of translation,
where the new language gave you insights into the old, and they suited the
voice besides.

Second, the singers themselves weren't just guys who happened to walk
in off the street.  Swingle recruited from the French conservatoires
and from the cream of the Paris recording studios.  Sometime, read the
professional biography of Annie Germain, Claudine Meunier, or Jean-Claude
Briodin.  For a group of very fine musicians indeed, Swingle not only
created arrangements, but discovered a choral sound that "worked" with the
contrapuntal complexity of Bach - light and rhythmically flexible, with
connections to such bop groups as Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, Les Double
Six, and the Gordons.  He saw Bach as primarily a composer of music that
danced, that razor-sharp rhythm and perfect intonation made up the road to
success, because these things clarified Bach's intricate textures and moved
the music along.  He enhanced the singers' rhythm with a rhythm continuo of
string bass and drum kit, never overdone.

The French group disbanded in 1973, and Swingle moved to England to found
Swingle II, which itself has undergone a few transformations.  He retired
in the early Eighties, but he continues to advise and to occasionally
arrange for the present bunch, once again known as the Swingle Singers.
More than nationality has changed, however.  A different approach prevails
as to arrangement.  Now, the singers generate all sounds vocally.  The
basses imitate the string bass, and some members, at least, have learned
how to imitate the jazz drummer's brushes on cymbals, probably through a
technique very close to spitting.  That they almost always fool my ear
amazes me.  They yield nothing in blend or rhythm to previous incarnations
of the group.  For years, furthermore, they've managed to add vocal music
and composers other than Bach to their repertoire, and again they do very
well indeed.  What they lack, however, is a star soloist who can emerge
from the team bench, something they had at the outset in Christine Legrand.
In thirty years, they've not managed to find another.  The candidates on
this CD are very good, but not magical.

Nevertheless, I found this a wonderful album.  The Temple of Beauty
rescinded my membership a long time ago.  The arrangements are mostly
new (the "Badinerie" from the second orchestral suite the only one I think
I've heard before).  The opening of the simple chorale "Ein' feste Burg"
just about raptures me out by the purity of its intonation.  The several
fugues for organ move mightily.  Listen to the unearthly clarity of the
chorale prelude on "In dulci jubilo" or of the andante from the second
sonata for solo violin.  These, to my mind, are great Bach performances,
not simply great pop performances of Bach, and, what's more, the Swingle
Singers in any of their incarnations came up with them as if such things
were no big deal.  Perhaps I'm too smitten to see the truth of the things,
but I compare them to performers like Tureck and van Asperen.

The Singers haven't stood still.  At least three controversial
arrangements appear on the program: "Bist du bei mir," a three-part
invention, and the andante from the second solo violin sonata.  For the
latter two, the arranger has added parts, although parts in keeping with
the implications of the harmony.  For "Bist du bei mir," the arranger has
added the equivalent of tail fins, with jazz harmonies, not completely
bizarre, but certainly out of period.  I happen to love it, and the
original, after all, is nothing more than a bare-bones sketch in Anna
Magdalena's notebook.  Why not? The arrangement bears the same relationship
to the original as Bach's chorale harmonizations do to their originals.
And as far as "bizarre" goes, listen to the final cut: Bach's
harmonization of the chorale "Es ist genug," appropriated by Berg for
the violin concerto.

I admit the album contains a couple of misfires, notably an arrangement
of the chorale prelude on "Wachet auf," which really does trivialize the
original.  I don't know who made the new arrangement (the Swingles for
years have used arrangers other than their founder), but I much prefer Ward
Swingle's original version from the Sixties.  There's also an excerpt from
the third Brandenburg which fails to take off.  It seems thin.  Perhaps
this is a fault of performance, but it comes across as missing a necessary
weight.  Maybe you just can't do this with only eight singers.

Overall, however, a charming album.  The sound has the usual miked and
slight echo-chambery quality of most pop albums, but if you accept the
genre, it shouldn't bother you.

Steve Schwartz