From Tafelmusik, a Bach That’s All Business

Tafelmusik, the early music group based in Toronto, has brought us another of their enlightening takes on Baroque music, this time zeroing in on the resources composer J. S. Bach, based in Leipzig from 1723 until his death in 1750, had to realize his compositions.

Presented Saturday evening by Meany Center for the Performing Arts jointly with the Early Music Guild and titled “J. S. Bach: The Circle of Creation,” the seamless show comprised a narrator, Blair Williams, and 15 musicians who stood and sometimes strolled around according to how prominent their parts were, except for the seated cellos and harpsichordist.

The performance began with Williams telling the story of how the first instrument came to be, as Mercury made a lyre from a tortoiseshell and seven strings, then traded it to his father, Apollo. Visuals on a large overhead screen accompanied the evening’s entire performance, beginning with ancient statues and tortoise, then morphing to 18th-century musical Leipzig, with statures of both the gods on a rooftop.

Bach was a busy city employee in those days, with music required at more than one church, for city occasions, and for his own enjoyment at Zimmerman’s Coffeehouse on Friday evenings.

The concert continued with excerpts from Bach’s music interspersed with Williams strolling into the center and describing who made both strings and woodwinds, where they lived, where they got the wood and what kind of wood, what instrument strings were made of and where sourced, how the building was done, not to mention how Bach managed to write down his compositions—who made the paper, what from and how, as well as the inks, and the quills for pens and for plucking harpsichord strings, even how he could draw the staves straight on the paper. The overheads illustrated all of this, showing modern instrument makers demonstrating construction details and the next moment showing the local sheep from which came the wool for harpsichord felts and gut for strings.

And in between, the musicians played movements and excerpts from a dozen and more Bach works, both sacred and some typically played on those convivial Friday nights, with emphasis on the instruments being described, so plangent Baroque oboes and meaty bassoon came to the fore when showing their construction.

It was a brilliant, absorbing creation, designed, pieces arranged, and the whole concept coming from double bass player Alison Mackey. It was never too much—it would have been easy to get into further details of, say, violin fingerboards and pegs, or the materials needed to make bows, but it was far more interesting in the overall picture to hear about the clothing rules for different grades of Leipzig society, and a little horrifying to hear that, 250 years ago, Jews in the city just for an annual fair had to carry a piece of yellow cloth.

Musically of course, the concert was splendidly played. Tafelmusik’s reputation has been solidly built since its 1979 inception. Let’s hope it is back with another of these marvelous, imaginative programs in the not too far distant future.