Noa Briefe an Bach

Nobody knows why Johann Sebastian Bach composed his six suites for solo cello. Nor does anybody know how it came about that the suites were soon afterwards consigned to oblivion and more than a century before a 13-year-old Spanish musical prodigy discovered a worn copy of the score in a second-hand bookstore store in Barcelona. For the next 11 years Pablo Casals practiced them every day. Finally, in 1936, he entered London’s Abbey Road studios to record the second and third suites for the first time. The rest, as they say, is history. Today, Bach’s cello suites have become a rite of passage for all aspiring cellists.

Noa was an obscure Prog band from Japan, led by drummer Ichiro Takesako, a huge fan of Bill Bruford.The other members were Hirofumi Mitoma, who played electric- and synth guitar and bassist/singer Takao Ohzeki.They released one album for the unknown PAM label in 1987, titled ''Tri-logic'', recorded at the Studio Plus One in Setagaya in Feburary 1987…

Reissue of an obscure underground French album from 1980. Noa features a histrionic female vocalist, piping the French language and enunciating syllables just like another instrument. The music of Noa is of the jazzy Zeuhl variety, with plenty of sax (some shrieking), soaring flute and the expected rhythms of the genre. Although the general mood of the album is Zeuhl-influenced (the dark vibe & the female voice that reminds Eskaton), the main influences claimed by the band are Henry Cow & Art Zoyd. The fact is that the use of the female voice has something to do with HC's Dagmar Krause era. Line-up includes guitar, bass, flute, sax, drums, percussions & female vocals. This album, sadly the sole recording of the band, is a real curiosity, a pretty experimental record that could have only come out in France during this period, at the turn of the 70s.

The ongoing cantata cycle of Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan was initiated in 1995. The series has now reached its 40th volume, in the meantime receiving an astonishing number of distinctions from magazines and critics all over the world. But parallell to their cantata cycle, Suzuki and his Collegium have also recorded Bach’s larger-scaled choral works; recordings which have caught the imagination and attention of audiences and critics alike.

Sigiswald Kuijken directed these performers, based notionally in Trondheim, for a festival concert in Sarrebourg in 2015. Like other takes on the great corpus of Bach cantatas by groups who are attempting to show us his works in a wider context, this pair is presented in the wider context of the musical expression of the final conflict between the forces of good and evil in the late 17th century. Buxtehude’s cantata Befiehl dem Engel, dass er komm (BuxWV10) and Christian Geist’s Quis hostis in cœlis provide the context for Bach’s compositions for Michaelmas in 1724 and 1726.