Joshua Rifkin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joshua Rifkin (born April 22, 1944 in New York) is an American conductor, keyboard player, and musicologist. He studied with Vincent Persichetti at the Juilliard School of music and received his B.S. in 1964. He also studied with Gustave Reese at New York University (1964-1966), at the University of Göttingen (1966-1967), and later with Mendel, Lockwood, Milton Babbitt, and Oster at Princeton University where he received his M.F.A. in 1969. He also worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen at Darmstadt in 1961 and 1965.

Rifkin has taught at several universities, including Brandeis University (1970-1982), Harvard, Yale, and (currently) Boston University. He is noted for his research in the field of Renaissance and Baroque music. One of his widely accepted findings is that Bach's St. Matthew Passion was first performed in 1727, not 1729. He is particularly noted for his hypothesis that much of Johann Sebastian Bach's vocal music, including the St. Matthew Passion, was performed with only one singer per choral part, an idea generally rejected when he first proposed it in 1981.

But in the 21st century the idea is becoming widely influential. The conductor Andrew Parrott has written a book arguing for the position (The Essential Bach Choir; Boydell Press, 2002; as an appendix the book includes the original paper that Rifkin began to present to the American Musicological Society in 1981, a presentation he was unable to complete because of a strong audience reaction). Such respected Bach scholars as Daniel Melamed and John Butt have argued in its favor. And Rifkin and Parrott are no longer the only notable conductors to adopt the approach in performance. Among the early-music performers to adopt the practice are Paul McCreesh (St. Matthew Passion, Magnificat, Easter Oratorio, and cantatas), Konrad Junghänel (B Minor Mass, several cantatas, and the motets), and Jeffrey Thomas, as well as Sigiswald Kuijken and Eric Milnes, both of whom are recording complete sets of the Bach cantatas using one singer per choral part.

Rifkin himself has recorded Bach's Mass in B Minor, Magnificat, and cantatas nos. 8, 12, 51, 56, 78, 80, 82, 99, 106, 131, 140, 147, 158, 172, 182, 202, 209, 216, and others, for the Nonesuch, Mainach, L'Oiseau-lyre, and Dorian label, all with his Bach Ensemble and various singers. He has recorded with the Concertgebouw Chamber Orchestra and Capella Coloniensis in music of Handel, Mozart, and Haydn. He recently published a book-form monograph, Bach's Choral Ideal (Dortmund: Klangfarben Musikverlag, 2002). His scholarly edition of Bach's Mass in B Minor has recently been published by Breitkopf and Härtel.

In the 1960s, Rifkin created arrangements for Judy Collins on her albums In My Life and Wildflowers. He performed with the Even Dozen Jug Band (along with Dave Grisman, Maria Muldaur and John Sebastian, among others) and made a recording of his humorous re-imaginings of music by Lennon and McCartney in the style of the 18th century, notably Bach, known as the Baroque Beatles Book and recently reissued on CD.

Rifkin was at least partly responsible for the ragtime revival in the 1970s when he recorded a collection of Scott Joplin's works for Nonesuch records, still in print on EMI.