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