“Modern”
means “lush, rich, well-upholstered, grand”. It also means “soupy
and lacking rhythmic drive or any scholarly input”. At least that's
the impression you'd get from some reviewers of Bach recordings. I'd
normally be on their side- I've never heard a performance of a Bach
cantata from a modern symphony orchestra with the dance of Philippe
Herreweghe's Collegium Vocale Ghent, the beauty of sound of Masaaki
Suzuki's Bach Collegium Japan. But Ricardo Chailly is a man on a
mission to remind the world that you can be lithe, exciting and most
of all fast with Bach, even
if you're using modern instruments with not a gut string in sight.
Admittedly, his 2010 Christmas Oratorio recording is with a
modern-instrument orchestra that ought to have Bach's choral
tradition in its blood- the Leipzig Gewandhaus: founded in Bach's
lifetime, providing musicians for St Thomas's since 1840, and keeping
the flame of Bach's cantatas alive in throughout the Communist
regime.
And
flame is precisely the right metaphor for Chailly's performance of
the opening chorus for the Sunday after New Year. It crackles along a
shade faster even than John Eliot Gardiner's recording. The
brightness of the chorus's light vowel sounds and generally high
tessitura (including excitable near-squeaks from the sopranos on
“sei dir Gott!”)
is heightened by the modern pitch, a semitone higher than the baroque
standard.
But
the brightness quickly darkens; we are in a territory of danger and
political intrigue, as hazardous as 1980s East Germany. The chorus's
“Wo ist der neugeborne König der Jüden?”, with
its repeated Wo?...
Bach,
Christmas Oratorio, No. 45)
...reminds
me of nothing more than the crowd's mocking three-fold “Wir,
Wir, Wir haben keinen König” turba (crowd)
chorus in the St John Passion:
(Bach,
St John Passion, No. 46 opening)
The
key and time signature is the same too, and the soprano part which
follows is more or less note-for-note, with the word Koenig
at the end of a B minor triad.
(I've highlighted it in green). Bach would have last performed the
Passion less than three years previously in April 1732, and it seems
unlikely that the near-quote is completely accidental. The textual
similarities with the Passions don't end here, anyway- the later
tenor recitative sings of Herod summoning the high priests and elders
in exactly the same terms as in the St Matthew Passion. But these
resonances go beyond the simple similarity of the words and the
music. They're both examples of political power in the hands of weak
and frightened men; Herod at one end of Jesus's life, Pontius Pilate
and the Jewish priests at the other. And the blood of innocents is
shed as a result of the rulers' fear and weakness in both cases.
But
the crucial difference is that the alto soloist is musically
integrated into the turba, standing
apart and playing the part of a believer listening to the story. The
alto responds “Sucht ihn in meiner Brust”- look
for him in my heart. There's no way that this is literally
dramatising a character present in the Gospel story. Instead a
temporal division is made in the drama to create two narrative
levels, held in tension. The kings, and Herod are the base level; but
Bach's own listeners, eighteen hundred years later, are themselves
given a place in the drama at a higher level. So the distinction
between actor and audience, singers and congregation, is being
blurred and chipped away; Bach is showing that his listeners are
still as much part of the great continuing drama of salvation as the
kings, the shepherds and the child in the manger were.
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