Classical byDermot Clinch
You don't expect Bach to imitate Tchaikovsky. But in Christus, der ist mein Leben, BWV 95, a strict Lutheran cantata written for the 16th Sunday after Trinity in 1723 on the theme of the imminence of death, he does. The plummy, dancing tones of "Everyone's a Fruit and Nutcake" are unmistakable.
Bach had his reasons. This is axiomatic. Behold, said the day's gospel, a dead man being carried out of the city gates. Christ took pity. A miracle: "He that was dead sat up." Enlarging on this theme for our benefit, Bach paints a picture of a joyfully ticking timepiece, of the soul imploring death to set it free. "Strike soon, blessed hour!" Violins buzz, plucked cellos chime the hours, oboes lock in expectant embrace. In Bach's musical theology, death - and salvation - can't come too soon.
The cantata is available in volume seven of the complete series of Bach's cantatas from Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra on Erato. They have reached Leipzig; they will remain there for 27 years and 40 more CDs, until Bach dies. The Bach Collegium of Japan under the direction of a former pupil of Koopman, Masaaki Suzuki, is also in the city, on its trek through the cycle for the BIS label. Where the Hanssler complete edition of all Bach's works has got to is anybody's guess. The 160 CDs are available singly, by subscription, or in their entirety for a modest up-front payment of £899. Completion date is June 2000: the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. Though the Dome be stuffed full of junk, yet shall our shelves groan with heaven.
Or perhaps you are too familiar with Bach? Did the St Matthew Passion at school, had "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring" at your wedding, hear the Christmas Oratorio every year at its annual audit? Then turn to the cantatas. Do you know the aria that precedes "Jesu Joy" in Cantata BWV 147 - the one where the unborn Christ leaps in Mary's womb and the oboes go wild and gambol like little lambs out of Berlioz? The aria, wrote W Gillies Whittaker in his 1957 study, "is, naturally, banned by public taste today".
The cantata music is exceptionally vivid. Because we do not know them as well as we should, we have to use our brains. What are those endlessly repeated falling notes in the bass line about? The text speaks of prayer. Perhaps they are a sign of repeated genuflection. The recorders in BWV 184? Christ the shepherd. Shepherds always get recorders. But what about that up-and-down flowing stuff in the violins in "Jesu Joy"? The musical tropes and metaphors are present and correct; we must decipher them.
But who, in this journey, should we be following? The cantatas in the Hanssler complete Bach, with great singers like Arleen Auger and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, may be fine; but they are on modern instruments, and they are old recordings repackaged. The Japanese series and the Dutch one use instruments of Bach's period. If you want reconstructed slide horns and oboes d'amore and da caccia as Bach heard them, that is essential. Koopman's series has notes by the prominent Bach scholar, Christoph Wolff, which says much about the cantus firmus and the structural symmetry, but nothing about a work's quality. The Japanese notes are less unbending. Wolff, aptly, has re-edited the essential Bach Reader, a collection of Bach documents and the indispensable monument to positivist musicology.
So the Japanese. No funny liquid consonants; only some of the highest standards in current Bach performance anywhere. Where Koopman goes for the cool, the magisterial, Suzuki goes for calculated abandon. The opening chorus of Die Himmel Erzahlen die Ehre Gottes, BWV 76 - The Heavens Declare the Glory of God - sets the standard for the project: a repeated fugal hammering with high trumpet that lifts you from your seat. The performances are nuanced but superbly confident. And they convey an elation - an elemental, uplifting joy - of which only Bach is capable. You get a similar sense with Mozart in his great operatic ensembles: that of an entire genre being simultaneously created, determined, defined. Nobody, ever, will do it better.
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