Reviews

THE TIMES

JC Bach concert at Cadogan Hall (22 Apr 2009)

Six funerals, and a wedding: well, they had to draw the audience in somehow. Or did they? When the English Baroque Soloists decided to celebrate not Johann Sebastian Bach, but his father's cousin, Johann Christoph, they had a hunch that it just might not be a sell-out. But John Eliot Gardiner's missionary zeal for the all-but-forgotten Bach knows no bounds; and he talked up his dark, austere motets so enthusiastically that we became almost convinced that a jolly time was being had.

As it happens, J.C. Bach's brand of sober musical pietism really does draw you in anyway. The uncompromising honesty of the word-setting, and its dense, dark fabric of gambas, cellos and basses, creeps into the nerve system in a rather delicious way. The evening began with an aria meditating on tears, which begin life and which are dried only on the gloomy bier. But how life-affirming the hushed lilt of the unaccompanied eight voices, the artistry within the inflection of the words.

The violinist Maya Homburger and a band of six joined the bass voice of Matthew Brook for Wir bist du denn, O Gott, her bow releasing the fierce anger held within his sighing. It was to be quite a night for Homburger: her obbligato in the shadowy lament Ach, dass ich Wassers gnug hätte , gently sung by Clare Wilkinson, as well as in a long Dialogue after the interval, offered a dimension of spiritual anguish far beyond words.

The shadowlands of J.C.Bach and 17th-century Lutheranism became so alluring that the evening's sole attempt at levity was something of a let-down. To sell the delights of a Dialogue based on the Song of Songs, Gardiner and his soloists nudged, winked and rolled their eyes and larynxes through the wedding Dialogue, Meine Freundin, du bist schön, ending in a bibulous and bucolic hymn of thanksgiving.

HILARY FINCH

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/classical/article6133346.ece