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GRAMOPHONE (07/2013)
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Soli Deo Gloria
SDG185
Code-barres / Barcode : 0843183018529
Reviewer: Lindsay Kemp
The final disc in Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach cantata cycle offers the four works for Ascension Day — cantatas from the years 1724-26, plus the more familiar Ascension Oratorio of 1735 — that could not be recorded on the original Bach Pilgrimage in 2000 because of a noisy venue. These performances come from a specially mounted concert in St Giles’ Cripplegate, London, in May 2012.
BWV3 7 is the earliest of the cantatas and opens with a chorus so liltingly delightful that one imagines the only reason it is not the first item on the disc is its rather tired-sounding choral entries. BWV128, the next, features festive horns, a burst of free-spirited arioso midway through and an alto-tenor duet cut from the same humble cloth as the ‘Et misericordia’ of the Magnificat BWV43, the last, is the piece that actually opens the disc, and proves worthy with a surprise opening of gently overlapping string lines quickly dissolving into a trumpet call that turns into the start of a choral fugue — an imaginative and exuberant representation of the Ascension. Drama was clearly on Bach’s mind in this cantata, for its second part opens with a blustering bass recitative — imagine that bursting in on the end of the sermon!
Gardiner’s performances show the ready familiarity with the music you would expect. His thoughtful approach to detail really shows itself in the choruses, perhaps above all in the chorales, each of which finds his own expressive solutions. Among the soloists, Dietrich Henschel with great authority, while the other, younger voices are slightly less sure-footed technically, though the distinctive vocal quality and penetrating emotion of Meg Bragle’s ‘Ach, bleibe doch’ in the Ascension Oratorio suggests that she could become a sought-after artist. The recording quality is variable — some choruses sound surprisingly dull, some solos rather close — but no one completing their cantata cycle with this single disc need feel short-changed.
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