Nazi Bach

[robinturner]

Recently my satellite provider opened up the digital radio stations which had hitherto been unavailable on the "Standard" package. One of my favourites is "Popular Classics", which I thought would serve a sickly diet of "The Nutcracker Suite", "Peter and the Wolf", "Bolero" and suchlike, but turns out to be mainly baroque and early classical. The baroque music is nearly all "authentic" (to the extent that any twenty-first-century performance of an eighteenth-century composition can be authentic) but for some reason, today they're playing lots of Bach with full symphony orchestra and piano. It's not just the instruments that are modern(ish); the style is what one of my old teachers called "Nazi Bach" (i.e. every semi-quaver drummed out with equal weight and Teutonic precision). It makes me feel rather nostalgic for the days when Bach was not something you were supposed to listen to for pleasure, but was regarded more as a kind of mental calisthenics.