Texte paru dans: / Appeared in: AAM007 |
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Appréciation d'ensemble / Overall evaluation :
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Reviewer: Nicholas
Anderson
Handel’s setting of Barthold
Heinrich Brockes’s non-liturgical poetic Passion, scored for oboes, bassoon,
strings and continuo, was premiered in Hamburg in 1719 but was not performed in
England where its German text would have been of little general interest. Following August Wenzinger’s recording in the mid-1960s, Handel’s Brockes-passion suffered decades in the wilderness. Now, there are four competing versions, all of which do fairer justice to the piece than Wenzinger’s somewhat lustreless albeit pioneering endeavour. While the two more recent versions, by Peter Neumann (Carus) and Laurence Cummings (Accent) follow the copy which Handel performed at Leipzig in the late 1740s, Richard Egarr and his score editor Leo Duarte have cast their net wider, drawing upon other sources. All is meticulously documented in a lavish book containing commentaries, full sung texts and an illuminating essay by Ruth Smith.
This formidably
well-documented project is matched by a comparably sympathetic performance.
Egarr paces the piece unhurriedly, recognising Handel’s often vivid responses to
Brockes’s graphic text and drawing from them deeply felt, contrasting emotions.
From among a uniformly strong solo cast, Elizabeth Watts’s Daughter of Zion, a
reflective conscience of the work, Robert Murray (Evangelist) and Ruby Hughes
(Faithful Soul) – her tender portrayal of the darkness after the Crucifixion,
scored for bassoon and strings is affecting – are especially rewarding.
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