Joshua Rifkin - Rifkin and Bach

Rifkin and Bach

Rifkin is best known to classical musicians for his thesis that much of Johann Sebastian Bach's vocal music, including the St Matthew Passion, was performed with only one singer per voice part, an idea generally rejected by his peers when he first proposed it in 1981. But in the twenty-first century the idea has become widely influential. The conductor Andrew Parrott has written a book arguing for the position (The Essential Bach Choir; Boydell Press, 2000; as an appendix the book includes the original paper that Rifkin began to present to the American Musicological Society in 1981, a presentation he was unable to complete because of a strong audience reaction). Such respected Bach scholars as Daniel Melamed and John A Butt have argued in its favor. Furthermore, Rifkin and Parrott are no longer the only notable conductors to adopt the approach in performance. Among the conductors to record and perform music of Bach using some form of the vocal scoring argued for by Rifkin are Konrad Junghänel (Mass in B Minor, several cantatas, and the motets), Sigiswald Kuijken (Mass in B Minor, St Matthew Passion, and the beginning of a cycle of the complete Bach cantatas), Paul McCreesh (St Matthew Passion, Magnificat, Easter Oratorio, and several cantatas), Eric Milnes, who has begun recording the complete cantatas cycle with one singer per part, Marc Minkowski (Mass in B Minor), Philippe Pierlot (masses and cantatas), Masaaki Suzuki (motets), Jeffrey Thomas, Jos van Veldhoven (Mass in B minor) and Matteo Messori (Christmas Oratorio, cantatas, motets).

Rifkin himself has recorded Bach's Mass in B minor, Magnificat, and cantatas nos. 8, 12, 51, 56, 78, 80, 82, 99, 106, 131, 140, 147, 158, 172, 182, 202, 209, 216, and others, for the Nonesuch, Mainach, L'Oiseau-lyre, and Dorian labels, all with his Bach Ensemble and various singers. He recently published a book-form monograph, Bach's Choral Ideal (Dortmund: Klangfarben Musikverlag, 2002). His scholarly critical edition of Bach's Mass in B Minor was published by Breitkopf and Härtel in November, 2006, and was recorded by the Dunedin Consort led by John Butt for release in 2010. It is the first edition to follow strictly Bach's final version from 1748–50, not intermixing readings from the 1733 Missa (the first version of the Kyrie and Gloria), or certain revisions made posthumously by Bach's son C.P.E. Bach.

Rifkin has also made a reconstruction of J.S. Bach's posited Oboe Concerti: for oboe, strings and continuo in D minor, from BWV 35, 156, 1056 and 1050; in A major for oboe d'amore, strings and continuo from BWV 1055; in E-flat major for oboe, strings and continuo from BWV 49, 169 and 1053. All the original movements are keyboard settings. They reflect the Baroque oboe idiom convincingly. In this form, they evince the influence of the Venetian school, notably Marcello, Corelli and Vivaldi.