Iestyn Davies, Bach Cantatas

 Iestyn Davies with Arcangelo, Bach Cantatas 36 and 169 (Hyperion)

This isn't exactly a 'new release' but it's 2022 so it's not old either, it's just that I'm not as quick off the mark with it as I like to be.

As in the pop music days, one hears a record on the wireless and then buys it. That was for one item out of the four here but you are unlikely to be disappointed with Bach Cantatas and Schütz which constitute the other three.

BWV169 opens with the busily investigative organ nimbly weaving its way through a bright Sinfonia under the hands of the excellent Tom Foster. Organ music isn't my favourite genre but this is a sparkling beginning before the unreal purity of Iestyn Davies in the Gott soll allein mein Hertz haben which soars in the aria. One of the very greatest Bach cantata records is that of Nathalie Stutzmann whose contralto is an entirely different thing but this is contrastingly equally thrilling. The flowing ornaments in Stirb in me,

Die in me,

Earth, and all your empty pleasure,

are the high point it reaches before the short choral prayer it ends on.

 

Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott is a setting taken from Psalm 51 by Schütz, the same text as Allegri's Miserere, but its downbeat torments accompanied by dark violins and violas don't glimpse the same eternal light.

It was Klag-Lied, the elegy for his father by Buxtehude who it is thought wrote his own grieving text, that sold me the record, though. One recording of such a piece isn't enough when a further version like this turns up, fluid, floating and unearthly. The undertstated viola da gamba accompaniment sets a mood for Iestyn to sorrow gorgeously over, explaining and bereft. It is one of the short list of Buxtehude masterpieces and one can only wonder at what the old maestro would have thought of such a perforrmance.

Back with Bach, Tom Foster again gallops through the Sinfonia of BWV35, headlong towards towards,

I marvel;

For everything that one sees 

Must fill us with amazement.

The oboes are a big feature in the 'joyous alleluia' of deliverance and hope of the aria it ends on and one has to envy those who could believe their prayers would be answered in,

From this sorrow-laden yoke of pain,

...let me soon in your arms

End my life so full of torment.

 

We are blessed enough with countertenors on earth, as we are with cellists, not to want to end this life of torment just yet and Iestyn Davies is on unbeatable form here. I haven't bought many new discs this year but this must be a certainty for any Critic's Choice top few.