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Reviewer:
Jonathan Freeman-Attwood A patchwork quilt of contemporary Saxon life, the marrying of the vernacular – both in text and music – of the gentry (a new regional governor) and peasants living in feudal harmony is both charming and deeply ironic. While dedicated to Carl Heinrich von Dieskau, the appointed boss, the cantata is about two ‘peasant’ characters getting tipsy and mildly bawdy, and engaging in a litany of satirical observations about local dignitaries. Peppered with praise, the dedicatees are elsewhere lightly satirised: their inability to produce sons (‘only’ five daughters) and the squire’s reputation for ‘a little smooching’ doubtless raised as much of a smile as the statutory roasting of the tax collector. Suzuki gets into the swing of this burlesque immediately with deft timing, organic contrasts of bucolic temperament and a winning characterisation of the ‘base and popular’ viewed through a courtly prism. The director’s own keyboard playing adds to the intimate and rolling spontaneity, surely Bach’s most tantalising example of what opera might have afforded him. The art of expressing a great amount in short, incisive movements is tellingly juxtaposed in the extended Arcadian centrepiece, ‘Klein-Zschocher’ (the manor where the action happens). Mojca Erdmann captures its tender blessings with languid ease, if perhaps a little too supinely at times. The flute writing is as sweet here as it comes, and Kiyomi Suga revels in the part’s descanting roulades.
Rumblings of
authorship still encircle the soprano cantata Non sa che sia dolore and
yet it is always a joy to hear, especially with the instrumental fragrance of
Bach Collegium Japan. Erdmann is curiously beguiling and slightly lazy in equal
measure, colouring gloriously but with slips in intonation and concentration
that should have been cleared up. Dominik Wörner puts up a brave fight in the
slightly unwieldy fellow Italian cantata Amore traditore but it’s his
skilful ‘buffon’ in the Peasant Cantata, and the performance as a whole,
that marks out another fine BCJ production. |
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