Bach's music endures from mandolins to film scores
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- Bach dominates classical charts and Easter performances from London to Leipzig, Rome to Rotterdam, with Yunchan Lim's Goldberg Variations and Raphaël Pichon's St John Passion among current top recordings.
- Raphaël Pichon's new St John Passion recording features an opening chorus the Guardian's Clive Paget described as a 'meat-grinder,' built on obsessive string repetitions and dissonant woodwind lines forming 'a gigantic cross shape in musical time.'
- Violinist James Ehnes compared Bach's instrumental music to 'zombies' — indestructible through any arrangement, from saxophone quartet versions of the Goldberg Variations to Wendy Carlos's synth transcriptions and Leopold Stokowski's orchestrations.
- Bach features prominently in film, from Pasolini's 1964 'The Gospel According to St Matthew' to Hannibal Lecter's choice of the Goldberg Variations' Aria while attacking a prison guard in 'The Silence of the Lambs.'
- Mandolinist Chris Thile's second volume of Bach's Sonatas and Partitas, recorded in New York parks including Tompkins Square, layers urban sounds — birdsong, footsteps, passersby — into performances Thile says put Bach 'at the centre of life.'
- Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson performed the Goldberg Variations more than 90 times in a single year, writing in the Guardian that each performance is 'like a religious pilgrimage, or a conceptual work of art.'
Why it matters: Bach's continued chart dominance during Easter, backed by high-profile new recordings from Lim and Pichon, confirms the catalog's commercial staying power, while transcriptions ranging from mandolin to saxophone quartet keep the works accessible to listeners who would never sit through a harpsichord recital.
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