Closing concert

What memories do you have of your first encounter with Bach’s B Minor Mass?

I must have been about 17 when somebody in my home town of Zwolle lent me a record of the B Minor Mass. For me, it was love at first hear, even if at the time I didn’t understand much about the complex structure of the piece, of course. Then in the 1980s I worked on the Missa for the first time with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and the Netherlands Chamber Choir and I’ve also played the continuo organ in other performances on several occasions, which has helped me get to know the work better from different perspectives.

The B Minor Mass is made up of 27 individual movements with very different musical forces and styles. Do you feel that it’s a unified work all the same?

At every performance I’m always astounded at how well the individual pieces, which are so different from one another, go together. You find the old-fashioned and the modern Bach; the choir sings in four, five or eight parts; the orchestral forces are forever changing. And yet you never have the feeling that the Missa is bitty, it’s always one magnificent whole.

Bach the Lutheran wrote this »Catholic mass«. Is it possible to assign the B Minor Mass to any one confession?

I have great sympathy for Michael Maul’s hypothesis that Bach wrote the complete mass in 1749 as a commissioned work for a performance by the »Musicalische Congregation« in Vienna. There is some evidence for it, even if the definitive proof is lacking. With it, the ageing Bach would have provided elegant proof that he was above confessional differences. That reminds me of an anecdote: a few years ago, we performed the B Minor Mass in the Lateran Basilica in Rome with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir. At least 300 Catholic dignitaries were there, including cardinals and bishops. They were probably pretty tired and exhausted. But when we came to the phrase »Et in unam sanctam catholicam ...« they all woke up and sat up, as if they realised »that’s for us, too«.