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From the intense and heartfelt rapport between John Eliot Gardiner and his ensembles captured on this recording, one would be hard pressed to predict that they would formally part ways earlier this year. The conductor’s ‘cancellation’ unfolded swiftly following his alleged altercation with a singer at the end of a performance of Les Troyens in summer 2023. The website of the Monteverdi Choir, founded 60 years ago by Gardiner, contains a scant few references to him, and the booklet for this release forgoes artist bios altogether.
Still, the conductor is thoroughly in his element in this fresh account of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, recorded over two evenings of live performance – each devoted to one half of the vast work – at London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields in December 2022. Gardiner’s 1987 recording of the Christmas Oratorio with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists has been a longstanding benchmark, yet this performance overflows with a sense of surprise and delight at the inexhaustible riches of Bach’s music – in particular, for his tireless invention and gift for scene-painting.
As Gardiner points out, the act of performing the Christmas Oratorio ‘in a single block, as an oratorio’ is actually ‘unhistorical’. Bach wrote the six individual cantatas comprising the work to accompany different liturgies throughout the Christmas season in Leipzig in 1734-35: one each for the first three days of Christmas, the Feast of the Circumcision (New Year’s Day), the first Sunday of the New Year and Epiphany. Of particular fascination is his ‘parody’ reworking of material originally written for secular contexts (such as two arias taken from Cantata No 213, a work depicting Hercules ‘at the crossroads’).
Nevertheless, this performance conveys a sense of musical, scenic and thematic cohesion across the span of these six cantatas. Each considers the Nativity narrative from a different angle, with a corresponding shift in atmosphere and musical palette. The rich, dark sound of four period oboes enhances the pastoral warmth of Part 2’s depiction of the journey towards the manger, for example, while the Adoration of the Shepherds is represented by Part 3’s ‘Schliesse, mein Herze’: here, Kati Debretzeni’s stirring obbligato violin and the excellent countertenor Hugh Cutting evoke a mood of profoundly intimate contemplation.
Despite some unevenness among the cast of Monteverdi Choir soloists, the interplay between the singers and obbligato instruments is especially effective. A Blu-ray Disc included along with the CDs offers vibrant visuals of the performers that underscore their immersion in the text and its word-painting, such as the superbly expressive soprano Hilary Cronin in the ‘echo aria’ in Part 4 (actually a double echo with soprano and oboe). The shots are interesting and varied, with Shirazeh Houshiary’s enigmatic St Martin’s East Window as an ever-present backdrop. As the Evangelist, Nick Pritchard guides us through the narrative – largely elaborated from Luke’s Gospel – with focused energy.
Ever attentive to Bach’s harmonic boldness and dancing rhythmic pulse, Gardiner sustains his alertness to detail in ensemble phrasing and dynamics without sacrificing dramatic momentum. He elicits admirable precision from the Monteverdi Choir for moments of solemnity and expressive warmth alike. With the church’s reverberant yet refined acoustics, tonal balance is particularly satisfying, evoking the appropriate sense of joy, reverence, devotion and, in the culmination of Bach’s trumpets-and-timpani sound images in Part 6, euphoria.
In a booklet interview that takes the place of a programme note, Gardiner neatly articulates the hold of this music: Bach ‘vaults over time and over all sectarian divisions, and provides consolation and solace accessible to all’. |
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