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Reviewer:
Huntley
Dent The last high-profile St. John Passion to come my way was led by René Jacobs (reviewed in Fanfare 40:1), who had his own particular notions about performance style. Trying, probably in vain, to avoid sinking into the quagmire that appears when you utter Bach’s name, I commented, “So many unanswered questions swirl around Bach and authentic style that you can either tear your hair out in frustration or look upon the lack of definitive answers as open season.” In this new recording, Marc Minkowski makes few daring choices, which surprised me from a conductor whose Messiah was fast enough to be shot from a cannon.
His take on the St. John
Passion is intimate, hewing close to musicology that favors a handful of
singers in the choir and soloists who step forward from it. The singers
listed in the headnote constitute every vocal performer. Only the Evangelist
of Lothar Odinius and the Jesus of Christian Immler are separate. (Odinius
is also assigned a tenor aria, Immler two bass arias.) We are past the era
when Bach became more reverential by expanding the chorus into a crowd (this
does have the advantage of evoking a community of faith), but when your
singers can all squeeze into three telephone booths, the issue isn’t
religious feeling but flawless execution. A large choir masks the slips and
smudges of individual voices.
Here the opening chorus,
“Herr, unser Herrscher,” is unusual, not for the small forces but because
the voices aren’t blended. It sounds more like eight individuals, each
responding personally to the text. As a sonority the effect is rough and
somewhat raw at times, but the advantage comes in the sense that each singer
expresses his or her own devotion, unlike hearing a chorus with a unified
spirit. Some interpreters like John Eliot Gardiner have the chorales sound
smoother, more formal and solemn than the choruses, but Minkowski doesn’t. Because I want Bach to sound spiritual, as devotional music should, and also passionately individual, as befits Bach’s Lutheranism, this performance won me over early. But it also showed its drawbacks early, in the solo singers. As an interpreter of the Evangelist, Odinius is unexceptional either in his vocal acting or in communicating compassion to the listener. I also found his tone whiny to the point of disagreeable-ness. As Jesus, Immler possesses a well-produced bass but without real distinction, and his portrayal of Christ follows the modern tendency to avoid sounding holy, which seems wrongheaded in this of all roles. In the arias the other singers sounded on first hearing no better than very good choristers. Authentic or not, a St. John Passion without stellar voices loses a great deal, both in beauty and interpretative depth.
I found countertenor David
Hansen’s timbre unpleasant to listen to, and out of curiosity I looked him
up online. He is Australian, successfully engaged in opera and oratorio. So
the mistake is mine in expecting a higher level of solo singing—a cursory
investigation reveals that these are all experienced Baroque performers with
international backgrounds and flourishing careers. My standards in Bach may
go far back to Kathleen Ferrier, Janet Baker, Fritz Wunderlich, and Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau, but shouldn’t modern Bach soloists at least rival the later
generation of Arleen Augér, Nancy Argenta, Anthony Rolfe-Johnson, and Nathan
Berg, for example? I noticed the same falling off in Gardiner’s recent
remake of the St. Matthew Passion compared to his first one. Minkowski’s
soloists sometimes sound as if the technical demands are so challenging that
there’s no room for artistic expression beyond the basics.
Many listeners won’t share my
opinion about voices, and in other respects Minkowski, as we’ve come to
expect, leads a lively, fully engaged performance that has no trouble
holding one’s attention. I wondered about his unpredictable taste for
excessive speed. The humble, radiant soprano aria “Ich folge dir gleichfalls”
seems to fly by, but a check of other HIP recordings reveals that Minkowski
is observing the norm. The beautiful bass aria with chorale “Himmel reisse,
Welt erbebe” feels breathless to me at a tempo that forces Christian Immler
to clip his phrases and spit out the embellishments. (Note: For the
recording Minkowski adheres strictly to the original text of 1724, but in an
Appendix to Part One we get two additions from 1725 that were used in
concerts preceding the studio sessions—the above mentioned bass aria and the
tenor aria “Zerschmettert mich, ihr Felsen und ihr Hüge.” The latter is a
generous touch, since it allows us also to have the more famous tenor aria
that Bach replaced, “Ach, mein Sinn.” The instrumental body consists of 21 musicians, along with an unusual continuo of organ, harpsichord, contrabassoon (a choice Bach added in 1749), and theorbo, a plucked instrument in the lute family. Minkowski explains his choices in an extended interview that’s quite readable and informative. To portray the spirit of this performance, he says, “We never tried to create a contrast between solo and chorus, or to identify a voice with a particular ‘character.’ This remains the Passion of a group of soloists … Lutheran dogma ignores distinctions between sinners. It is important for Peter and Pilate to be sung by the same person.” Experienced Baroque collectors will no doubt have an opinion about Minkowski, which means that the aspects of his St. John Passion that irritate me—the clipped, at times brusque, phrases, impatient pacing, and lack of pathos—might not register as complaints. Bach’s Passions have come to be treated as tense psychological narratives more than religious ceremonies. In that vein, Minkowski’s focus on urgent drama should satisfy a wide range of listeners. Few will weep, however. | |
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