Bach: Wunderbar

The tapestry-lined Hall of Hercules in Munich's bomb-battered Residenz palace was packed, and the exquisite prospect of journalistic mayhem was in the air. Grim critics, with knives sharpened and hatchets drawn, were on hand to slice up youthful (31) Karl Richter, regarded by loyal fans as the greatest musical talent of his generation in Germany. Organist-Harpsichordist-Conductor Richter had committed a double crime: irreverence for the mighty Bach and the almighty critics.

Richter is a Bach specialist in a country where the cult of Bach demands that old Johann Sebastian be approached in the traditional manner, with coldly precise and mathematically measured accents. Defying convention, Richter brought a dynamic new approach to his Bach reading. His performances proved so brilliantly illuminating that he was offered the top job in the world of German Protestant church music, Bach's own post of Thomaskantor in Leipzig; Richter refused so he could stay in Munich, where he developed a fine 100-voice Bach choir. Gradually the critics became disenchanted. Richter, they felt, had slipped into sentimentality; worse, he seemed to be reaching too far out for effects and succeeding only in distorting the master. After one disastrous concert, when he tried to branch out to Bruckner, the critics spoke of "limited musical horizon," "small technical capacities." Furious, Karl Richter tried to keep the press from his next concert.

Last week, with the critics admitted once again, Richter was obviously out to rehabilitate himself. His 2 1/2-hour program included two secular Bach cantatas (Nos. 214 and 207A), the Violin Concerto in E Major and the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6. The Brandenburg was the most unorthodox. In keeping with Bach's principle that any number can play, Richter had the work performed by only eight players--two violas, a cello, two violas da gamba, two string basses and a harpsichord. It emerged as a chamber work with crystal transparency, uncovering contrapuntal voices heard as they were seldom heard before.

Richter, who knows Bach's entire keyboard works by memory, was at the harpsichord himself, his back to the audience, rising to conduct arias and choruses, then dropping like a falcon to improvise accompaniments for the recitatives. The critics were disarmed. Richter gave them a joyfully dynamic performance that was nonetheless satisfyingly authentic. Admitting that there were no signs of Richter's previous peccadillos in this concert and genially explaining the old flaws as "growing pains," the dean of Munich's critics, Karl Heinz Ruppel, summed up the concert in one word: "Wunderbar!"

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