Reviews

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Residency at Spitalfields Music (17 Dec 2008)

Four Stars

John Eliot Gardiner's approach to the interpretation of Bach seems to have mellowed over the years. There was a time when his speeds could sound breathless and too keenly crisp, as if he were making a conscious effort to counteract the lugubrious reverence accorded to Bach's music in bygone ages.

Now, however, he has struck a happy medium, injecting momentum into the music but at the same time allowing it the space to express more fully its inner emotional points.

Gardiner and his consortium of the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists are currently in residence at the Spitalfields Winter Festival, giving concerts, "interacting" and generally extolling Bach's virtues.

The half dozen main programmes, lasting about an hour, have been neatly arranged so that each contains one of the cantatas from the Christmas Oratorio, one of the Brandenburg Concertos and a Bach motet. The scheduling does not allow Gardiner to perform the cantatas on the exact days of Christmas and New Year for which Bach intended them in 1734-5, but it is certainly authentic to split them up.

With the Christmas Oratorio still ringing in my head from having sung in it last weekend, I can vouch for the joy that the music generates. The Monteverdi Choir, singing the first cantata "Jauchzet, frohlocket!", seemed to have been gripped by almost evangelical zeal, grinning broadly, tossing their heads and gently swaying and bobbing up and down to the triple time of the opening chorus. There was no doubt here that Gardiner had found the pulse of the dance that underpins so much of the sacred music Bach composed.

Nor did he neglect its sensuality, coaxing the singers into cosseting the word "Verlangen" ("longing") in the oratorio's first chorale "Wie soll ich dich empfangen", and giving the motet "Komm, Jesu, Komm" BWV229 a soft, mellifluous lilt.
The singing and playing were spot on, so much so that on occasion it teetered only just on the right side of sounding mannered and manicured. But diction was as clear as could be, the textures lucid, the impact heartfelt. Matthew Brook gave a lusty account of that gift of a bass aria, "Grosser Herr, o starker König", the alto Clare Wilkinson was limpid in "Bereite dich, Zion" and the tenor Nicholas Mulroy was a poignant Evangelist. With a buoyant performance of the Brandenburg Concerto No 6, this was an uplifting harbinger of the Christmas Season

Geoffrey Norris

www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/classicalmusic/3794482/Spitalfields-Winter-Festival---review.html