Bielefeld
Geoffrey Thomas knew how to stimulate the listener’s emotional responses in the intimate space of the well-attended concert.
A technically flawless Bach performance, which required special attention, because it seemed inward in its most explicitly virtuoso moments and was therefore more strongly moving.
Neue Westfälische
Neue Westfälische
Threatened Sound World
Geoffrey Thomas in the Capella hospitalis
By Matthias Gans
Bielefeld. There are instruments, which require a sheltered room: the clavichord, for example, with a sound so delicate that it appears to be threatened even by the applause.
In a series organized by the Capella hospitalis with the appropriate name, “Sound of Silence,” the American early music specialist Geoffrey Thomas demonstrated how deeply felt even such extroverted works as Bach’s partita in e minor or selected preludes and fugues from the second book of the Well-tempered Clavier can sound on this instrument.
A beautiful sounding travel clavichord by Bielefeld harpsichord and clavichord builder Christian Fuchs was made available to Thomas for the evening. It is a simple instrument made from selected Alpine spruce with a soundboard of hazel spruce, a wood that, according to the builder, gives the tone a light tonal onset. Geoffrey Thomas met the special challenge of the sensitive tone with an agogically free, breathing performance, expressively amplified with dynamic nuances. Although Johann Sebastian Bach might well have preferred the harpsichord to the clavichord for a concert performance of these works, Geoffrey Thomas knew how to stimulate the listener’s emotional responses in the intimate space of the well-attended concert in the chapel.
Thomas, using his acting ability, prefaced individual movements with his own stories full of strong images, which may have served to provide some listeners with a guideline. But, was Thomas sufficiently expressive? The playing alone was indeed sufficient and eloquent with its sensitive rhetoric in the musical figures and sound gestures, such as the sighing figure from the f minor prelude.
A technically flawless Bach performance, which required special attention, because it seemed inward in its most explicitly virtuoso moments and was therefore more strongly moving. For the honking football fans on Oelmühlenstraße this was an inaccessible world of sound and sensation.
