Reviews

THE SUNDAY TIMES

Residency at Spitalfields Music (14 Jan 2009)

John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists launched their millennial Bach Pilgrimage — performing all 200 or so of the composer’s liturgical cantatas on a year-long tour around Europe and to New York — at Christmas time in Weimar with the Christmas Oratorio. Although it is usually performed as a single entity, Bach conceived the “oratorio” as a six-part celebration covering the entire Christmas period, with individual cantatas for each of the feast days.

Nine years later, Gardiner has returned to these works, presenting them in short one-hour-plus concerts (all but the first given twice in an evening) and programmed with other Bach in sets of six: the motets and Brandenburg Concertos. This is a felicitous example of Gardiner’s interest in creating musical events, rather than mere one-off concerts. His reverence for Bach — he writes in the programme that, for him, “Christmas without Bach is unthinkable” — requires a grander concept than simply a traditional yuletide performance of the oratorio, and the Spitalfields Winter Festival, in the near-ideal setting of Hawksmoor’s masterpiece, Christ Church, has given him the opportunity to spread the musical celebrations either side of Holy Week. The first half of Gardiner’s mini Bach fest happened earlier in December; the last three cantatas will be performed on January 5, 7 and 8.

Times have changed since the heady days of the 1980s, when Gardiner’s Monteverdi and EBS forces recorded most of the large-scale Bach works, with starry soloists, for Deutsche Grammophon’s early-music label, Archiv. Gardiner is older and wiser, and, with typical resourcefulness, has embraced the new austerity as an opportunity and a challenge. He looks as grand and commanding as ever, but the full concert fig of white tie and tails has been abandoned in favour of a dour-looking black version of a Chairman Mao shirt, its only concessions to flamboyance fluorescent lime-green cuffs — useful for conducting in a power cut, no doubt.

Gardiner is one of the most physically imposing conductors in the business, but his manner has become more genial and collaborative. The big solo names may have vanished from the playbills, but he seemed happier coaxing broad smiles from his mostly youthful choir as they launched into the jaunty opening chorus of the first cantata, Jauchzet! Frohlocket! (“Rejoice and be merry”). I don’t recall seeing the Monterverdi Choir enjoying themselves as much as this in years.

With all the tribulations, as well as triumphs, of their Bach year (Gardiner writes passionately about them in his unputdownable travelogue, emerging in parts in the booklets for the live recordings his own label, Soli Deo Gloria, is issuing of the Pilgrimage concerts), they have clearly bonded. The ethos of the Monteverdi Choir has always been to nurture young singers — and to combine the best of professional and amateur — and his work continues to bear rich fruit in this respect. It is hard to think of another choir of this type and size — about 40, on the large side for Bach in these minimalist days — that sings with such commitment and splendour, words and music given equal value.

This is one aspect of Gardiner’s Bach, of course, that hasn’t much changed. He has always argued in favour of large forces,especially in the great “festive” works, the two Passions, the B Minor Mass and these Christmas compositions, which deploy unusually rich orchestral forces — different for each cantata — with trumpets and drums to evoke the angelic throng. In line with the minimalists, however, he now — probably rightly — regards the Brandenburg Concertos as chamber rather than “orchestral” music, with one player to a part and no conductor.

That may have explained the slight drop in temperature, at the opening concert, between the ardent pleading of the motet Komm, Jesu, Komm and the trumpet jollification of the Christmas cantata, when a small EBS ensemble played a routine but characterless account of the most unorthodox Brandenburg Concerto, the violinless No 6 for violas, viole da gamba, cello and bass. The lack of bright upper-string tones made it all sound both wheezy and muddy in Christ Church’s reverberant acoustic. At my second concert, Brandenburg No 5 — the one with important flute, violin and keyboard solos — fared better, though Matthew Halls had to wait for the astonishing harpsichord cadenza at the end of the first movement to make his presence felt.

The soloists, drawn from the chorus, were variable, but Nicholas Mulroy (tenor/Evangelist) narrated the Christmas story with crystalline diction and a pleasingly plangent tone, and Matthew Brook made something both grand and slightly ironic of singing Grosser Herr, o starker König (Great Lord and Strong King) four feet from the Prince of Wales, who was sitting in the front row. Brook is a rising star.

Samuel Evans, his younger bass colleague in the third cantata, Herrscher des Himmels (Ruler of Heaven), is also a singer of immense promise. Their solos were highlights, and the chorus of shepherds, positively scampering Bethlehemwards in this cantata of glad tidings, put everyone in the Christmas spirit.

Hugh Canning

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