Music is, somehow, supposed to have more power when we feel sorry for the musicians. Psychologically disturbed David Helfgott certainly owes his success to having a miserable life in the film "Shine." Beethoven is the worst, or best, for just being deaf. Now Johann Sebastian Bach is getting the pity-treatment.

The Hilliard Ensemble, along with violinist Christoph Poppen, performed the musical fruits of such a project Sunday night in Schoenberg Hall. Though they didn't necessarily prove the validity of the pity hypothesis, they gave such wonderful performances that it didn't seem to matter.

Unlike most classical musicians who perform pieces, such as a piano sonata, the Hilliard Ensemble, a classical barber shop quartet so to speak, sings their albums. They sang their album "Revelations" for the first half of the concert. This consisted mainly of interlacing 16th century choral works with modern composers using ancient texts. The quartet really brings this often neglected music alive. The ensemble is made up of soprano Monika Mauch, countertenor David James, tenor Rogers Covey-Crump and baritone Gordon Jones.

The second half of the show saw the singers perform from their album "Morimur," which contains their "remixing" of Bach. Based on Helga Thoene's 1994 thesis, the basic idea centers around Bach's devastation in learning of his wife's death during a 1720 trip – she was buried before he had a chance to see her again.

This grief caused him to encode the last movement of his second solo violin partita, an instrumental piece like a sonata, written also in 1720, with various inaudible musical references as a memorial to her. Since a solo violin can really only play a single melodic line, the other lines hidden within the implied harmony allowed Bach to express emotions without revealing their deeply personal content. The modern-day equivalent of this might be a claim that playing a Britney Spears album backwards would elicit a message like "Pepsi sucks." If this sounds too crazy and oblique, that's because it is, like reading too much into a text.

Controversy surrounded this revisionist idea, angering Bach scholars around the world. The Hilliard even canceled the planned post-concert discussion, perhaps fearing the worst from a conservative audience.

The truth may lie somewhere in between, as Bach often encoded his name – musically the notes b flat, a, c, and b natural – in his pieces, most famously in his "Art of Fugue." Yet if Bach's "troubled life" can help sell CDs or aid in introducing Bach's music to a new generation, then so be it. Regardless if Thoene's theory works, the music remains wonderful and full of power.

The Hilliard Ensemble took turns with Poppen on violin in order to set up the connection between the partita and various religious chorales that Bach famously harmonized. The Hilliard proved its metal with thick, palpable German diction and ethereal tone. While the music usually takes a choir of 30 or so, the Hilliard's mere quartet framed the music as more intimate and compelling, just as a string quartet has an intimate intensity unlike a large string orchestra. Poppen flew on his violin, as if Bach's notes took him by surprise, giving a fresh, edgy sound.

The only thing lacking from this arrangement was open, reverberant acoustics, which provided the cathedral grandeur on the album. Unfortunately, Schoenberg Hall was acoustically dry, with the music evaporating rather than floating in a mist.

The punchline of the concert – the Hilliard singing along with the Bach solo violin partita – lasted about fifteen minutes and had a sad kind of beauty, even if one thinks Thoene is a quack. With good performances and good music, it hardly seems to matter whether Bach wrote the music for his dead wife or for some money to feed his children. The remixing of Bach may just have been an excuse to perform his pieces in unorthodox ways, but if so, then bring on the excuses.