BWV 202, Weichet nur, betrubte Schatten begins like Zadok the Priest in slow motion. There are only so many chord sequences available and I suspect Handel might have lifted it from Albinoni anyway but the music soon leaves behind any such trivial parallels. Played time and time again, it appears bottomless, inexplicably faultless and seemingly able to explain everything. You might try to tire out its sumptuous luxury, not only the composition but the sound of it, the fact that there are over 200 of them and these are only three. I'll go back to it again soon and see how tired it sounds.
I hope it's not impolite to notice from their picture that the Freibuger Barockorchester are a mature group and one wonders if their playing benefits from accumulated and shared wisdom because it always has enough time and space, tone and manner to restate the case for Bach - that never needs any reconsideration- at a time when Mozart had been pressing his beguiling charms on me again with The Magic Flute, amongst other things, and Handel is usually on the premises ready to overwhelm with his flamboyant genius. I am forever trying to convince myself that if I could only have either books or records I would have books because literature is somehow the real thing. It never quite works. Bach is better than Shakespeare and poetry has a hopeless job on if it wants to prove itself a higher calling than music.
Carolyn Sampson is, thankfully, wherever one looks these days, working too hard, I reckon, but only satisfying a demand and if it's not Dowland songs in the Wigmore Hall or the headline-grabbing disrobing in Handel opera a while ago, it turns out that the Poulenc Stabat Mater quite recently was her as well. I'd forgotten that. I had a minor concern that she was a bit more lush and sensual than Bach's Lutheranism requires but these cantatas concern themselves with renewal in Spring, a re-joining with God expressed in sometimes seductive metaphors that end in bliss, and a wedding cantata in which 'Cupid once again goes on the prowl' so her talents are not entirely out of place. She doesn't have quite the same magnificent dignity that Natalie Stutzmann's set has but that is because she's not supposed to. And, with Dietrich ostensibly not being quite as sexy, before anybody starts to suspect it is what Ms. Sampson looks like that makes me admire her, I might point out that I like Josquin DesPrez, Yehudi Menuhin and Dmitri Shostakovich as well.
Andras Wolf, bass-baritone, in BWV 152, Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn, can be smooth and tender as well as agile, and an obvious highlight is the duet that ends that middle cantata of the three here.
The wandering lines of the oboe, an innovation by JS in church music at the time, are happiness in a bottle, here played by Katharina Arfken, it says, and so special mention to her, weaving her way alongside Carolyn so that track 7 needs to be flicked back and heard again because, like the best such pieces, it isn't long enough.
The continuo seemed high in the mix at first and Carolyn, in the early stages, maybe not as prominent as she might be but either one becomes accustomed to that or why should it not be. One of the great, perhaps too often overlooked, features of the cantatas are the viola da gamba/cello parts where Bach is serving up plenty in behind when many would be distracted by the main line. It's not only in Bach that listening once is not enough because there's more going on than a few plays can appreciate.
This goes straight to the short-list for Disc of the Year, a category that has become more competitive than the poetry decisions I try to make come December. And so much for self-denial, surely there's something perverse about it, I've already been back to Amazon, eyeing up the Complete Cantatas, the amazing value on offer on one set made virtually a gift by my insurance people sending an e-mail kindly reminding me that I hadn't yet activated the £30 voucher they gave me for renewing with them that I had missed entirely.
I mean, for heaven's sake, surely I've got better things to do.
No, I haven't.
