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Fanfare Magazine: 37:3 (01-02/2014)
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Separate from his cycle of Bach’s church cantatas, Masaaki Suzuki has been recording the composer’s secular and other non-church cantatas composed for a variety of occasions, such as weddings, birthday celebrations, official civic functions (such as the installation of a new town council), and for entertainment (the “Coffee Cantata,” BWV 211, being an example of the latter). This, the third volume in the series, is titled Wedding Cantatas.
Volume 1 brought us O holder Tag, erwünschte Zeit, BWV 210, a secular cantata believed to have been written for a wedding ceremony, though whose is uncertain. Also included in Volume 1 was the aforementioned “Coffee Cantata,” a comic entertainment piece that portrays an exasperated father beside himself over his daughter’s addiction to the evil bean. The work was likely written for the patrons of Zimmermann’s Coffee House, and is in the same vein as a cantata like Telemann’s Funeral Music for an Artistically Trained Canary, in which a man returns home to find that his cat has made a meal of his prized bird. A review of Volume 1 doesn’t show up in the Fanfare Archive.
Volume 2, on the other hand, was reviewed by George Chien in 36:3. It included BWV 208, popularly known as the “Hunt” Cantata, which Bach composed for the 31st birthday of Duke Christian of Saxe-Weissenfels, and which allows us to precisely date it to 1713. The “Hunt” Cantata contains the famous aria, “Sheep may safely graze.” The sheep may be safe, but the deer had better turn hoof and run from the hunt-happy Count. Also included on Volume 2 are BWV 134a and BWV 1046a. The former, composed as a celebratory cantata for the New Year, 1719, is, appropriately, a dialogue between past and future, represented by Time and Divine Providence. The latter is not a cantata but an orchestral sinfonia, which turns out to be an early version of the opening movement of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 1.
On the present Volume 3, we have another birthday cantata, BWV 173a, this one for Bach’s Cöthen employer, Leopold von Anhalt-Köthen, in 1722. Alternately titled Serenata, it’s not one of Bach’s best efforts. In fact, of its eight short movements, six of them feature rather featureless, piping recitatives and arias for soprano or soprano and bass that are definitely not from the composer’s top drawer. The music isn’t helped any by soprano Joanne Lunn, whose voice has the timbre of a boy chorister rather than that of a mature woman. Nor does baritone Roderick Williams offer the score any help; his intonation is decidedly off the mark.
BWV 202, a wedding cantata composed in 1718 for a couple unknown, was possibly performed again three years later at Bach’s own wedding to Anna Magdalena in 1721. Unfortunately, its performance here brings no relief, as every one of its nine movements is for a solo soprano, and Lunn’s voice really grates on my nerves. Nor is she or Suzuki well served by Natsumi Wakamatsu’s sour violin obbligato in the cantata’s aria, “Wenn die Frühlingslüfte streichen.” It’s not just the spring breezes that flutter in this performance.
Listeners will recognize material from BWV 36c, Schwingt freudig euch empor, which Bach later used in a church cantata by the same name for the first Sunday in Advent, 1731. This earlier secular version was composed in 1725, and is believed to have been intended to honor one of Bach’s academic colleagues. Here we have a more substantial work, both in length and in scoring, which now calls for three vocal soloists—soprano, tenor, and bass—and a chorus.
If the two preceding cantatas on the disc are not top grade Bach, BWV 36c is prime cut, and its performance is a marked improvement over the two earlier works. Lunn, as noted, may not always sound like a fully mature soprano, but neither does Hiroya Aoki sound like a countertenor (which is how he’s billed), at least not in his beautifully delivered aria, “Die Liebe führt mit sanften Schritten.” The tessitura of the piece lies within the range of a tenor, and as tenors go, Aoki is a very good one.
BWV 524 exists in fragmentary form, and it’s not technically a cantata but a “catalog” quodlibet, which is defined as a folk form of humorous character, close to improvisation, that derives much of its effect through juxtaposing unrelated fragments, together with topical allusions, quotations from songs, toasts, sexually suggestive puns and vulgarities, and non-musical sounds associated with drunken revelries, such as shouting, clapping, and belching. In other words, it’s kind of an updated version of the bawdy English ballad and madrigal tradition of the 16th century and a precursor to Berlin’s 20th-century beer hall and libertine cabaret scenes.
It seems so utterly out of character for the composer of the St. Matthew Passion to have written something like this. But then, everyone has their unbuttoned moments, and having fathered 20 children, Bach must have had quite a few of them. There’s no making sense of the mishmash of a text, which Bach didn’t author, and which at one point has a woman from Brabant giving birth to a piglet. But the music, which Bach did write, sounds like a bacchanalian orgy. Singers shout, snort, and make noises that it’s best not to describe, lest more delicate sensibilities be offended. The album note indicates that such quodlibets were popular at weddings, “where they frequently got out of hand.” I should say so.
If my enthusiasm for this album is tempered by some less than ideal singing and by three out of four works that strike me as second-rate Bach, I would hasten to add that I have collected all 53 volumes so far released in Suzuki’s Bach church cantata survey, and as I’ve said in previous reviews, and say here again now, it is, in my opinion, the top period instrument cantata cycle on the market, besting Gardiner’s “Bach Pilgrimage” series with the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, Ton Koopman’s highly regarded Amsterdam cycle, and the still more than respectable Harnoncourt/Leonhardt cycle begun back in the 1970s.
To no small degree, Suzuki is disadvantaged here by some of Bach’s least inspired music, and one work, in particular, the Quodlibet, which would have better served the composer lining his garbage pail. Add to that a soprano and baritone who must have been having an off day, and this is the only one of Suzuki’s Bach releases I’ve heard—and I think I’ve heard them all—that I wouldn’t recommend, unless, of course, you have a burning desire to hear the raucous, riotous, ribald Quodlibet.
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