Joshua Rifkin

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Joshua Rifkin (born April 22, 1944 in New York ) is an American pianist, harpsichordist, conductor and musicologist. In 1978 he founded the formation The Bach Ensemble . Since 2011 he has been the artistic director of Bach: Sommers Arnstadt . The music encyclopedia The Music in Past and Present (MGG) by Bärenreiter / Metzler Verlag counts him “one of the most important Bach interpreters of the present”.

Studies and career

Rifkin studied with Vincent Persichetti at the Juilliard School with a BS (1964). He undertook further studies with Gustave Reese at New York University (1964–1966) and at the University of Göttingen (1966–1967). He then studied with Arthur Mendel , Lewis Lockwood , Milton Babbitt and Ernst Oster at Princeton University . He completed his studies in 1968 with the degree of a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) .

Rifkin has performed as a conductor and soloist with well-known orchestras in the USA, Europe, Israel, Australia and Japan. Orchestras he has worked with include the English Chamber Orchestra , the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Israel Camerata Jerusalem ; the St. Louis Symphony , the San Francisco Symphony, and the Victorian State Symphony Melbourne ; the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra , the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the Prague Chamber Orchestra ; the Haydn Orchestra of Bolzano and Trient , the Jerusalem Symphony , the Solistas de México , the BBC Concert Orchestra , the City of London Sinfonia , the National Arts Center Orchestra of Ottawa and the Houston Symphony . His repertoire ranges from Monteverdi to Handel and Mozart to Richard Strauss and Stravinsky ; nor are Gershwin , Copland and the latest modernism missing . Another field of activity of Rifkins are his interpretations of ragtime music, especially by Scott Joplin , with which he made a significant contribution to the revival of ragtime music in the 1970s.

Current work

The concert years 2008 to 2012 were mainly dedicated to Johann Sebastian Bach and took the musician to the Bach cities of Weimar and Arnstadt as well as Antwerp, Boston and Japan. The program included the Brandenburg Concerts , various Bach cantatas and the St. Matthew Passion with the ensembles Cambridge Concentus Boston and Kunitachi Bach Collegium . In the Oberkirche Arnstadt, where Johann Sebastian Bach's great uncle Heinrich Bach worked as an organist from 1641 to 1692, Joshua Rifkin performed two of Johann Sebastian Bach's concerts, which he had reconstructed: Concerto for oboe, 2 violins, viola and continuo in E flat major , reconstructed according to BWV 49 , 169 and 1053, and concerto for oboe, violino concertato, violino ripieno, viola and continuo in C minor , reconstructed according to BWV 1060. Rifkin's intensive occupation with Bach's cantatas came to a climax in December 2010 in Leuven / Belgium Solo performance of the Christmas Oratorio : Cantatas 1 to 3 were interpreted by Taverner Consort & Players under the direction of Andrew Parrott , cantatas 4 to 6 were interpreted by The Bach Ensemble and Joshua Rifkin and Sigiswald Kuijken and his ensemble were used for further comparison La Petite Bande with the Christmas cantatas BWV 122, BWV 57 , BWV 97 and BWV 151 on the program. As a result of the Arnstadt Concert in 2009, the Bach: Summer Festival was created in 2011 - annually in August - in Arnstadt and Wandersleben , of which Rifkin is the artistic director.

Rifkin and early music

Early music forms the main focus of his activity . In addition to his work with The Bach Ensemble and the joint recording of Bach's B Minor Mass , Bach's Magnificat and numerous cantatas, he directed the annual summer academy for early music in Brixen (Italy) from 1992 to 1997 . He performed Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at the Basel Theater ; In 2001 he made his debut at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich with a new production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Handel's Acis and Galatea . He was the musical director of the modern world premiere of Alessandro Scarlatti's Venere, Amore e Ragione in Chicago; he conducted Mozart's Requiem and multi-choir psalm settings by Heinrich Schütz at the Oude Muziek Festival in Utrecht . He also had guest appearances with the Ensemble Gradus ad Parnassum Vienna, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis , the Norsk Barokorkest Oslo and the Bach Concertino Osaka , with which he also recorded his supplement to the Bach cantata BWV 216. With the Cappella Pratensis Rifkin dealt intensively with polyphonic music of the Renaissance ; this collaboration also resulted in a CD recording. In the 1990s he also recorded two CDs with works by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with the Cappella Coloniensis , the baroque orchestra of the Cologne West German Radio .

Rifkin and his research results on Johann Sebastian Bach

Rifkin began an intensive study of Bach sources at an early age. One of his first discoveries in 1975 was that the St. Matthew Passion was not premiered in 1729, as was previously assumed, but on Good Friday in 1727. In 2000, in an essay in the Bach Yearbook , Rifkin came to the conclusion that the cantata Nun ist das Heil und die Kraft (BWV 50), which had raised questions for a long time, was not attributable to Bach. In 2006 Rifkin published a critical edition of Bach's B minor Mass by Breitkopf & Härtel. Bach's son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach posthumously incorporated parts of a mass from 1733, the first version of the Kyrie and the Gloria, into the now widely known version of the B minor Mass . In his critical edition, Rifkin first published the version that strictly adheres to Bach's last notes from 1748-50. In 2007 the work was recorded on CD according to Rifkin's new edition by the Dunedin Consort under the direction of John A. Butt.

Rifkin had a fundamental influence on the reception of Bach in the early 1980s with an article in which he attempted to prove that Johann Sebastian Bach usually had only one singer per voice in the choral parts of his cantatas, masses, passions and oratorios. In doing so, he radically broke with a tradition of interpretation that was shaped by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy's romantic ideas and the philharmonic ideal of the 19th century. His thesis initially encountered defensiveness and incomprehension in the musical public. But then Andrew Parrott took on Rifkins evidence and reasoning. In 2000, this former performance opponent Rifkins brought out his work The Essential Bach Choir , which was also published in German in 2003 under the title Bach's Choir - For New Understanding . In this paper Parrott published Rifkin's paper from 1981 again, meticulously discussed the pros and cons of his statements and disclosed all sources. Thus, all the arguments for the solo thesis were available to a broad public. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Rifkins and Parrott's research results are now largely undisputed.

In the German-speaking area, the theses met with comparatively greater opposition.

Teaching

Joshua Rifkin held professorships at various universities, including Harvard and Yale universities . He currently teaches in the Renaissance and Baroque Music Department at Boston University . Rifkin regularly leads master classes and workshops at renowned music festivals for early music.

Awards (selection)

Publications (selection)

  • "The Chronology of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion". In: The Musical Quarterly 61 (1975), pp. 360-387. doi : 10.1093 / mq / LXI.3.360
  • "Bach's Chorus: A Preliminary Report". In: The Musical Times 123 (1982), pp. 747-754. doi : 10.2307 / 961592
  • "Bach's Choir: A Preliminary Report". In: Basler Jahrbuch für Historische Musikpraxis 9 (1985), pp. 141–156.
  • “Victory cheers and sentence errors. On the problem of 'Now there is salvation and strength' (BWV 50) ”. In: Bach-Jahrbuch 86 (2000), pp. 67–86.
  • Bach's Choral Ideal. Dortmund Bach Research 5. Klangfarben Musikverlag, Dortmund 2002. ISBN 3932676106 .

literature

  • Andrew Parrott : The Essential Bach Choir. Boydell Press, Woodbridge (Suffolk) 2000. ISBN 0851157866
  • Andrew Parrott: Bach's Choir - Towards a New Understanding. Metzler / Bärenreiter, Stuttgart 2003.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.sonus-alte-musik.de/musiker/dirigenten/joshua.html
  2. ↑ http://www.bu.edu/musicology/faculty/joshua-rifkin/
  3. ↑ http://www.nieuwsblad.be/article/detail.aspx?articleid=BLIVA_20101211_001
  4. ↑ Today in the feuilletons: Take food away from women who are hungry for education! In: Spiegel Online . August 22, 2012. Retrieved June 9, 2018 .
  5. ^ [1] Rifkin in an interview with the daily newspaper Welt , reproduced in "KölnKlavier: Manuscriptsammlung Interpreten".
  6. ↑ Forum Kirchenmusik , May / June 2020 edition

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Rifkin, Joshua
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American conductor and musicologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH new York