Not there yet- not quite, anyway. In the next instalment we return to
the world of weekly sublimity, the ordinary round of cantatas that
make up possibly the greatest sequence of choral music ever written.
But we're still journeying towards that Jerusalem via some of the
Lenten byways and odd little paths. Yes, the last Sunday in Lent
before Palm Sunday is called Passion Sunday. But it's only an
anticipation- a foreshadowing of the real day of the Passion. So it
seems strangely appropriate to listen to a shadow of a Bach Passion-
a few brief hints of the greatness of what will come over the next
week or so.
The
Passions-Pasticcio was
only admitted to the canon of genuine Bach recently. Its catalogue
number, BWV 1088, puts it right at the back of the queue, along with
the fragments and the lost dusty jewels that have been dug out in the
last fifty-odd years. To be precise, only a few parts of it are
actually Bach. The rest is a jumble together of works by others. In
that respect, it's not a pastiche in the sense of composition in
someone else's style, as in Grieg's neo-Baroque Holberg Suite, for
example. All the parts speak authentically with the voice of their
composers, who range from the great (Telemann) to the
ought-to-be-better-known (Carl Heinrich Graun) to the
probably-best-left-alone (Johann Christoph Altnickol, Bach's copyist
and son-in-law). And even one of the parts that is probably by Bach
is actually based on a motet by his predecessor at Leipzig, Johann
Kuhnau. Clear? Good. I'm not even going to get into the fraught
debates over whether Bach himself glued the whole collage together,
or Altnickol, or Uncle Tom Cobbley. Let's just listen to it.
Usually,
I'm spoilt for choice with recordings of Bach cantatas. On Spotify,
there are at least five more-or-less complete cycles are available,
directed by Gardiner, Rilling, Leusink, Harnoncourt, and Koopman. And
there are big chunks of the complete cycle in Karl Richter's big and
chunky modern-instrument performances for those who like that sort of
thing; moreover, to my joy, Masaaki Suzuki has just finished his
stylish and beautiful complete set with the Bach Collegium Japan. And
then add to that all the one-off cantata recordings made over the
last ninety-odd years- for the greatest (and cheapest to produce)
like Ich habe genug,
there are dozens! Here, there's just one.
But
it's not as if the piece deserves neglect. The very first chorus is
by Telemann, the man the Leipzig councillors really wanted. And he
sweeps us up in a barrage of repeated questions from the chorus: “Wer
is der, so von Edom kommt? Wer? Wer?” “Who
is this
that comes
from Edom?
Who?” It's a good question, as the reference is rather obscure.
They're quoting from the prophet Isaiah, describing the strange and
disturbing figure of the Suffering Servant, part victorious, part
wounded. His garments are stained red. Is it with blood? Or with the
joyful grape juice from the new wine-pressings?
It's
all we'd expect from Telemann: vigorous, exciting- and not quite on
Bach's level of emotional depth.. A bass soloist takes on the role of
the Jesus-figure, confidently declaiming that “Ich
trete die Kelter allein, und ist niemand unter den Völkern mit mir.”
- “I have trodden out the wine-press alone, and there is no-one
from the people with me”. None of the complex anguish of the
choruses of the St Matthew or St John Passions here. This is a heroic
figure, stamping down the road to the crucifixion. Musically, there's
less sense of sheer melodic beauty than one might find in Bach. It
feels to me as if the chorus are a vehicle for getting through the
words, with the orchestra as the main source of musical interest.
That vigour persists in the next big chorus, “Fuerwahr,
er trug unser Krankheit”. Handel
more famously set the same words in English in the Messiah as
“Surely he has borne our
griefs”, and there's the same stabbing, insistent quality here. I
found it quite compelling.
But
this sense of drive isn't sustained. The Telemann material stops; a
fine little recitative is followed by a pleasant but uninspired
soprano aria, which totally fails to live up to the words “Ihr
Tropfen, fallt auf meine Brust”- “tears,
fall on my breast”. There's a sort of second-rate
eighteenth-century rhetoric that confuses crying with saying “I
weep” repeatedly, without any underlying emotion. It's all light,
happy, and requires little attention; if there were lifts in the
1730s, this would be the music they would play.
And
this feeling of attractive but insubstantial music continues until
the beginning of the second half. Some of it aspires to opera- for
instance, the aria Nimmst du der Kron der Dornen? (“Do
you take the crown of thorns?”) has a little of the spirit of one
of those Mozart moments where a Very Annoyed Soprano socks it to a
rather shocked baritone. But at the start of Part 2 we're confronted
with far more complex cross-rhythms in the chorus, a richer
orchestral sound with much more independent movement inside it, and
overall, a less superficial, more emotionally intense experience.
Bach has arrived.
This
opening chorus of Part 2, the first actual, real-live echt-Bach
in the piece, is an accompanied chorale fantasia of the sort familiar
from a dozen previous cantatas. It's a cousin of the great closing
chorus of Part 1 of the St Matthew Passion, O Mensch
Bewein. And it's followed by an
accompanied recitative for the bass, underpinned by a beautiful pair
of bassoons (No sniggering). It's one of my hobby-horses: baroque
bassoons are amazing, stylish instruments, with a suave, almost
jazz-saxophone-like sound. Their modern counterparts are more
penetrating, more reliable to play and more practical in a large
orchestra- but they've swapped their original laid-back cool for a
grumpy curmudgeonliness. So Prokofiev uses that modern sound to
symbolise the gruff old grandfather in his Peter
and the
Wolf. But here, Bach
uses that older, smooth-sounding bassoon to its fullness. Their
lovely falling phrases lull us into peace, as the bass sings words of
rest and comfort: “Meine Ruhe find ich hier...”- “I
find my rest here”. And for a moment we're in the dreamy world of
Ich habe genug, or the
end of the St Matthew Passion when the bass sings Mache
dir, mein Seele rein- “purify
yourself, my soul” and
the listeners are swept away into sleepy, cloudy musical heaven.
It
doesn't last, unfortunately. After about 6 or 7 minutes of Bach we're
back in the hands of lesser men. But, as the famously cloth-eared
Leipzig councillor said when grudgingly giving Bach the job in the
first place, if you can't get the best, you have to put up with
mediocrity. There are certainly some moments of interest in the
remainder of the piece. I particularly liked no. 32, the tenor“Mich
entseelt ein banger Schrecken”, with
an obbligato that made me sit up from one of those jazz-sax Baroque
bassoons.
And
Hermann Max's recording generally does a good job with this uneven
material. There's stylish orchestral playing from Das Kleine Konzert
that brings out the intensity of the repeated chords, and attractive
chorus work from the Rheinische Kantorei. I got the feeling that Max
selected his soloist more for the sheer beauty of their sound than
their technical adeptness. His tenor soloist, Markus Brutscher, has a
sweet, transparent voice in the serene recitatives- but the fast
beating vibrato at moments of emotional tension wasn't quite to my
taste. Similarly, his soprano soloist, Martina Lins, has a clear,
light and pleasing instrument. But I felt that sometimes she
sacrifices strict pitch accuracy for expression. At one point, when
she's singing vigorous downward figurations to the words “Macht
und Pracht” in number 37
towards the end of the piece, the melody almost slips down the stairs
and falls in a heap at the bottom. I found the countertenor, Ralf
Popken, unfailingly pleasant to listen to- always a good start with
countertenors- and he sensitively phrases the less earth-shattering
moments in the score to make some real music out of them.
Meanwhile,
the bass soloist, Hans-George Wimmer makes a beautiful job of the
parts that are actually Bach- and does his best with the lumpen aria
“Nun darf ich nicht mehr entsetzen”. Yes,
it's supposed to be portraying confidence and lack of fear. But it's
the sort of thumpy, over-bucolic music that Bach took the mickey out
of mercilessly in his cantata The Strife of Phoebus and
Pan, setting up sublime
Apollonian beauty against the bouncy “hup, hup, hup”style his
critics preferred.
There's just one further moment in the recording that's worthy of
real note- it's Bachian, rather than strictly Bach. Just before the
end, there's an adaptation of an earlier motet by Johann Kuhnau, with
additional instrumental parts that it's just possible that Bach
himself may have written. The darker emotional colours come back, the
instrumental parts become freer, as the bass part dances in a
sarabande. It's more inward, less superficial, more Bach. The
pseudo-Passion ends with a return to the simpler word of simple
melody-led homophony, repetition. This is probably what Bach's
congregations were listening out for, and apparently were satisfied
by. But what they got in other years was one of the greatest
masterpieces humanity and divinity have ever created. For that, we'll
wait for Good Friday.
(PS. A note of apology for this extended piece. I realise it's now
actually Palm Sunday, not Passion Sunday- and I'm a week behind
schedule. I hope to get through Palm Sunday's music over the next day
or two, and then the big stuff really starts...)
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