A Bach champion to the core

German conductor Helmuth Rilling could be a long-lost son of J.S. Bach, thrust into black jeans and a leather jacket and transported to the 21st century. Like Bach, the 70-year-old Rilling is a devout Lutheran (his father was a pastor), a church musician and a sometime organist. He’s recorded every note of the composer’s work -- including every fragment and stray movement -- on a 172-disc set, and this weekend in Los Angeles he will conduct two concerts of Bach from memory.

For the scholarly, Stuttgart-based Rilling -- perhaps the foremost living advocate of the composer whose music sits at the taproot of the classical tradition -- the Christian message of Bach’s music is essential to understanding it.

A quick glance at his resume, in short, doesn’t suggest a guy who’s especially flexible.

But although he’s served as a devoted evangelist for Bach, Rilling’s church is no exclusive club. In 2000, to mark the 250th anniversary of the Kapellmeister’s death, Rilling commissioned four composers to write passions inspired by the master. He picked a secular German modernist, a Russian Orthodox woman, a Chinese composer for whom Christianity was a relatively recent discovery and an Argentine Jew living in New England. He asked each to channel Bach through his or her own experiences.

“I was trying to say, if we want to honor Bach, we should show that his music touches on things that are still important,” says Rilling, sitting in a rehearsal room at the Colburn School of Performing Arts. “This connects our contemporary music with the music of the past.”

For the two farthest-flung -- the Argentine-born Osvaldo Golijov and the Chinese native Tan Dun -- Rilling made special requests: He asked Golijov to bring to the story of St. Mark the feeling of Latin American pageants, with their mix of dance and theater. And he asked Dun, whose task was to emulate Bach’s “St. Matthew”: “What do you think, coming in from the outside? What does the story mean to you?”

Perhaps because of his unlikely combination of purity and eclecticism, the eventual performances of these works became huge events in Europe and critical hits all over the world. Golijov’s, in particular, is to some listeners the most substantial and expansive piece of classical music so far this century.

“All four Passions did not have the destiny of so much contemporary music, which is that they premiere and then disappear,” Rilling says.

“The Passion is a topic which today, if you read the newspapers, is of the same importance it was 2,000 years ago,” he adds with a smile in the direction of Mel Gibson, whose film “The Passion of the Christ” has become an international blockbuster. (He has avoided seeing the movie, not wanting its images to confine his imagination.) “And I think for art it’s always very important that it be in close touch with the problems of human beings, in their time.”

Rilling’s appearances in Los Angeles this weekend, by comparison, bring him back to basics. None of the pieces in which he’ll conduct the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, he acknowledges, are masterpieces like “St. Matthew’s Passion” or popular concertos like the Brandenburgs. Instead, they’re cantatas -- three of the more than 200 short pieces Bach wrote for regular Sunday services at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig -- along with the Concerto in C minor for Violin and Oboe.

“Maybe you could say this is Bach’s daily life,” Rilling says of cantatas 68, 105 and 140, the last known as “Sleepers, Awake.” “But I have to say, what a daily life! What a creative level this man had in all his pieces. If one wants to know Bach really, to get close to this composer, I think you need to know his cantatas.”

Back in Stuttgart, Rilling runs the International Bach Academy, which looks at the composer as comprehensively as possible: Theologians and philosophers study the texts of the cantatas, musicians learn instrumental technique, scholars consider which instruments best re-create his original sound, and so on. (The academy also runs more than two dozen festivals around the world, including the Oregon Bach Festival, which will begin its 35th season in June.)

Despite the cantatas’ profound religious content, Bach’s work now lives in a world that can look, especially in Europe, increasingly post-Christian.

“Bach’s music becomes a symbol or monument to” Christianity, says Rilling. “You see these Gothic cathedrals in the 13th or 14th century -- symbols of something that people of that time cared very much about. You look at this music, from today, with a feeling of awe. And maybe, also, a feeling that you have lost something, which former generations had, that you admire.”

Bach’s music often inspires architectural metaphors; its intricate, overlapping structures make it seem almost physical, like the harmonic proportions of a Palladio villa.

By all reports, the composer thought of himself primarily as a hard-working Protestant, a kind of skilled bricklayer or carver of stone. “Whoever is equally industrious,” he once said, “will succeed just as well.”

What Rilling has found instead, over decades of performance and study, is that Bach -- whose name means “brook” in German -- has captivated people both inside and outside the tradition he represents.

“Just today I got a message,” he says. “They want to have a Bach festival in China. They want to know what is going on in the field.”

Within the enormous ethnic and religious range of those he hears spreading the composer’s Word, Rilling enjoys some performers whom purists dismiss as mavericks.

“Glenn Gould is a very good example,” he says of the pianist who attacked Bach’s work with a youthful ferocity. “Gould was such a good musician that his ideas and understanding of Bach brought many people to like that music. So great, wonderful. How can you do better?”

In contrast, the approach that seems to bother Rilling the most is that of the Bach fundamentalists of the “early music” school who try to re-create every detail of the composer’s time in performance.

“This movement of period instruments tends to go in a dangerous direction. We want to be true to the sound of a different era but not to alienate our audiences or make museum music,” he says, shortly before going outside for a smoke. “This would be like a sin against the Holy Ghost.”

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Los Angeles Master Chorale

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Today, 8 p.m.

Price: $25-$75

Contact: (213) 972-7282, (213) 622-7001, Ext. 215

Also

Where: Royce Hall, UCLA, Westwood

When: Sunday, 7 p.m.

Price: $16-$68

Contact: (213) 972-7282, (213) 622-7001, Ext. 215