Here we go again: As I’ve said before, too many times to count, “So what if you can perform the B minor Mass (or St. Matthew Passion, or other large-scale Bach work) with seven or eight or ten people–or a chorus of chipmunks”−just because you can, and because some reasonably credible researcher or respected musicologist claims “Bach did it this way”? In several previous reviews I’ve spelled out my arguments on this subject (see reviews archive), so I won’t repeat them in detail here (at least I’ll try not to).
Fundamentally, the problem with the minimalist performance approach—that is, one voice to a part—to Bach’s larger choral works, in this case the Mass in B minor, is made clear simply by looking at the music itself: the very nature and structure of the work—and I’m primarily talking about the choruses—defies the notion that it was conceived for such a meagre contingent of singers or that a composer with the creative capacity of Bach would expect it to be ideally realized by a bare minimum of participants. I argue that if Bach wanted to write for a quartet, he would have written quartet music. And there is absolutely nothing here to lead a careful observer to conclude, “Yes, this is chamber music!”
Using modern performers of the highest professional caliber and recording techniques that present performances by singers and orchestra in optimal acoustic perspective, proponents of the “one-to-a-part” approach demonstrate the feasibility of their theory, and so hopefully declare their case closed. And while this theory–most diligently researched and avidly advocated by Joshua Rifkin–is certainly worthy and deserving of respectful attention, all you have to do is listen to a performance (such as the superb one from Frans Brüggen and his Cappella Amsterdam and Orchestra of the 18th Century) and it’s reasonable to conclude that, no, Bach sometime may have had to accept minimal forces for his big choral works, but his conception clearly was on a grander scale–and anyone who understands the mentality of composers in the face of often unfair and unreasonable real-world constraints, both economic and artistic, knows that they never let the purely practical or necessary get in the way of the ideal.
Bach was a church musician, and the realities of that job were as inherently challenging then as they remain today; yet the practicalities of daily life at the Thomaskirche did not have to inhibit Bach’s creative ideas and aspirations. We might assume that to be the case if he were a characteristically cautious or strictly utilitarian composer. But of course he wasn’t, and there are countless examples to prove that Bach often thought on a larger scale than he had to: all those extraordinary obbligatos when a nice solo would have worked just fine; an extended double chorus (and perhaps an additional obbligato chorus) when a single choir could have done the job; and what of the monumental, still-incomparable organ works (written for the most advanced instruments of the day), and of course the works for solo violin and cello, creations whose extent of imagination—in both sonority and technical fancy—forever transformed the instruments for which they were conceived. So, especially in a work such as the B minor Mass, which Bach assembled not for an occasion, not for any particular group of performers, but for himself–why should anyone presume, even in the face of the musical evidence alone, that here Bach was content to think small?
This release has one important thing going for it that most of the other like-minded ones don’t: it’s a gorgeous recording, beautifully sung and played, with very well-matched soloist groups. And those soloist groups are very important because of the amount of singing they do both individually and in various combinations. If you’ve never heard this work before you will be impressed with the sheer beauty of the solo vocal work, the well-balanced vibrancy of the ensembles—and even if you know the work well you will not be disappointed in the singing, the orchestral playing, or the technical aspects of the performance.
However, when it comes to the big choruses, four or six or eight choristers “against” the much larger, more powerful orchestral contingent sounds like a mismatch, with the singers working way too hard to accommodate the demands of music that very obviously cries out not just for a louder single voice but for the cumulative power of multiple voices. Just listen to the “Gloria”, “Sanctus”, and “Osanna” movements, for example: as fine as the singing is, you’re just too aware of the effort to be able to move from noticing every detail to appreciating the greater design of Bach’s masterpiece.
Conductor Lars Ulrik Mortensen does an excellent job in maintaining sharp, well-defined textures and striving for a judicious balance between singers and orchestra–but when timpani and trumpets are involved, voices tend to either get overshadowed or push harder than they should have to. In all, this is certainly the best of the one-to-a-part versions of this work. I’m glad I heard it, but unlike conductor Mortensen, I’m not ready to embrace it.
