Why would the cover of a new edition of the Bach Motets feature a tightrope walker. It's hard to believe J.S. had time to practice doing that in between writing all those cantatas and fathering so much progeny. We are being encouraged to think about a fine balance, one would think. It might be a hint towards correcting the supposition that Bach is simply a mathematical perfectionist.
While the baroque style is clearly elaborate and apparently more disciplined than later Romantic composers who indulged in more self-indulgent expression of their overflowing passions as 'individuals' became more highly valued than the application of formal principles, it isn't fair on either side to regard Bach and his contemporaries as abstract pattern-makers or C19th composers as lacking order in composition.
So, if we prefer to, we could read the picture as a sign of great daring or an act of trust in God. Whatever it is, if we like it, art is often much better enjoyed rather than over interpreted and I sometimes think it better if it doesn't have to mean anything defintive.
(Having evetually read the notes in more detail, I find that John Eliot Gardiner writes that 'Bach expected of his singers an instrument-like virtuosity and the agility of a tightrope-walker, never more so than in the motets.' So I need not have wondered. But I'm not editing out and wasting all that introduction now, three days later).
Johann Sebastian's massive and immaculate output wouldn't necessarily miss these 72 minutes of music if he hadn't written them whereas if someone else had, they might be the centrepiece of a very respectable reputation. There are small continuo parts in places but this is choir music for all intents and purposes, wonderfully clearly recorded and if at times offering broad hymn tunes, also gorgeously intricate and cool in texture. Cool and warm, I'd say, if I wanted to undermine the whole idea of describing music in words and showing the whole art of music reviewing for the nonsense that it sometimes is. It sometimes seems like looking at a painting on the radio.
German can sound like a hilariously funny language to us Englanders but it never does in these settings. There's a wide range of thoughts and emotions here from one piece to the next, I'd rather not reduce them to 'moods'. Gute Nacht, o Wessen, is gentle and sympathetic while actually saying,
Good night, O you
who have chosen the world;
I do not love you.
whereas Weicht, ihr Trauergeister is a sweeping hymn line advising you spirits of sadness to go hence. The booklet's notes tell us that most, if not all, of these pieces are regarded as being written as 'funerary motets' and, if so, you can't help but appreciate the confidence with which their authors face their worldly demise. It can be a fine and noble thing to regard the world as unworthy if it can be done with the proper sense of decorum but it does rather depend on the gamble that there is something better to be had elsewhere. That thought doesn't seem to have troubled these writers.
The notes also refer to 'another example of Bach's unlimited cleverness' which hasn't ever been in doubt but which I take on trust and appreciate by absorbing it in smooth helpings rather than having any chance of being able to explain. He is one of those very few whose music would take an eternity to tire of if he was all you had on the desert island.
This is also a stylish release in that the disc is contained in a pocket at the back of a CD-sized hardback booklet so tastefully done that I might sleep with it tonight. It wouldn't honestly be among the first Bach music one might have to have but once you have some cantatas, concertos, violin sonatas and partitas, cello suites, the Well Tempered Klavier, the Mass in B Minor, the Passions, etc. then this wouldn't be a bad thing to put alongside them. There is something routinely wonderful about it.
