Steve Schwartz:

>Summary for the Busy Executive: Sprightly.

That's Pinnock, all right.

>One can also consider his earliest concerted work highlighting the
>harpsichord - the fifth Brandenburg - as a harpsichord concerto,
>and it must have astonished its first hearers, as the keyboard gradually
>rises out of the orchestra and eventually monopolizes the musical interest

I never realized this so much as at that concert in a frigid venue in
Paris I reported on at the end of February or the beginning of March.
Chilly fingers flew in the face of adversity there.

>Bach's relations with the Leipzig town council had plunged from habitually
>pissy to horrific.  From the beginning, they considered him a mediocrity,
>a judgment which startles us today.  They sneered at his music as
>"learned," in much the same way you now hear people scoffing at
>"intellectual" music.

There is a fairly recent book about Bach subtitled Johann Sebastian Bach:
The Learned Musician, by Christoph Wolff, which evidently flaunts what
was originally disparagement.  The book was a bit too learned for me to
get caught up in, I'm sorry to say, but I'll give it another go eventually.

>At any rate, Bach had been effectively replaced at the main Leipzig
>church,

I didn't know this.

>Leppard, one of the great harpsichordists of the century,

Really good conductor too, from what i have heard--notably with Mendelssohn's
complete Midsummer night's Dream music.  Gossamer touch where needed.

Jim Tobin