The Bach Family
Academy of Ancient Music, Lucy Crowe, Reinhard Goebel
Barbican. 18 June 2016

Unfortunately this concert will be remembered by me because, not for the first time, I found the behaviour of conductor Reinhard Goebel disturbing, both on and off stage. This started with his pre-concert talk, an event he totally dominated, arriving with his hands fumbling all over the hapless female AAM communications manager before announcing himself, and then suggesting that his much-handled companion also announce him. She then managed to ask one very simple question, which led to a rambling, incoherent, and often incorrect 30 minute monologue on practically anything but the question asked. For some reason, that probably didn’t reduce his ego, there was only one chair provided, meaning that the unfortunate communication manager ended up sitting at his feet on the floor at the edge of the dais. Amongst Goebel’s more alarming contentions was that Bach didn’t compose anything in the last two decades of his life, an extraordinary error that he only partially reined back on later in his talk. He also described Bach as a ‘nasty person’ who ‘hated the world’.

In the concert itself, Goebel pranced onto the stage clad in a clownish bright red cummerbund and matching bow tie and, bizarrely, carrying two batons. Continue reading →