TV REVIEW : ‘Stations of Bach’: Biographical Tour

Last week on PBS stations, Peter Ustinov brought us a raconteur’s version of the life of Mozart. Tonight, violinist James Buswell escorts us through “The Stations of Bach”--biography as travelogue. (It airs at 9:30 on Channel 28 and at 9 on Channels 15 and 24.)

It makes for an attractive, relaxed show, as the camera revels in churches and castles. Indeed, the countryside fairs better than does Bach’s music, presented in snippets that are simply the sonic equivalent of a camera pan over a city. As in the Mozart production, the performers must wait until the final credits for recognition.

Buswell is an engaging, overwhelmingly sincere host, but he does not carry this 90-minute documentary alone. There are frequent interviews with a wide range of Bach specialists, headed by Christoph Wolff. Their contributions are genially expressed elaborations on conditions of Bach’s time and/or soft forays into personality analysis.

The most striking of the interviews is with Hans-Joachim Rotzsch, the current cantor of the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, who compares the job today with the position as it was for Bach. Rotzsch’s reply (in subtitled German) when asked if the city authorities had any grounds for their complaints about Bach will endear him to church musicians everywhere--no, Bach did his job well; if anything, he had grounds for complaint against the city for the pathetic musical resources he was given.

Rotzsch also conducts the boys’ choir of the church. Other performers include organist Wolfgang Hofmann, harpsichordist Maria Brautigam, and the Bach Consort of the Leipzig Radio Orchestra, conducted by Max Pommer.

It is Buswell, though, who gets the lion’s share of the music, solo and with the ensemble, which he plays with affecting elegance. The effort to make points about Bach’s musical development, however, rests on short descriptive encomiums and unilluminating comparisons to contemporary architecture.