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Reviewer:
Alexandra Coghlan The American countertenor Bejun Mehta has one of the best voices in the business. Full, free and with real power behind it, it sits unapologetically at the operatic end of the countertenor spectrum, with a lovely natural spin to it. He’s also an unusually thoughtfully programmer, as his latest recital bears out. ‘Cantata’ traces the development of the solo cantata as it moves from Italy to Germany and England and from secular to sacred themes. The genre, Mehta demonstrates, embraces an unusually eclectic and wide-ranging set of styles and preoccupations; and if the resulting programme feels more like a collage than a coherent set of complementary works, it offers plenty of surprises and unexpected points of musical dialogue. To plunge straight from the opera-in-miniature that is Handel’s Mi palpita il cor to Bach’s Ich habe genug is startling. From gilded coloratura display and the mannered pathos of Handel at his most artful to Bach at his most sober, most severely beautiful is a shift of philosophy as well as style. But while both are sung with the same easy brilliance and musicianship (obbligato contributions from flute and oboe respectively are typical of the overwhelming excellence of the orchestral playing by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin) they also share the same delivery from Mehta. The pronounced portamentos and mannered expression that feels acceptable and organic in the Handel (and elsewhere in Vivaldi’s Pianti, sospiri e dimandar mercede, even in Johann Christoph Bach’s dramatically charged Ach, dass ich Wassers g’nug hatte) seem overdone, dare I say even vulgar, in the JS Bach, which suddenly has the uncomfortable sense of an opera-in-church-vestments about it. More successful, and much more intriguing, is Melchior Hoffmann’s graceful Trauermusik, its tolling bells marking the passing of time, and a meltingly lovely ‘Yet can I hear that dulcet lay’ from The Choice of Hercules (an oratorio cuckoo in the nest) brings the recital to a strong close. Is the baggy, generous, catch-all genre of the cantata genre really united by more than divides it? I’m not sure the case is quite as straightforward as Mehta here makes out. |
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