John Eliot Gardiner returns with another release in his Bach cantata series. As with some of the others, this one is not a new recording but comes from the early 1990s–just a bit misleading since it’s being issued as part of the truncated “Bach Pilgrimage” project that originally was to record anew all of the cantatas in sites all over Europe during this past year. The performances are certainly adequate, exhibiting the exacting precision and youthful energy characteristic of the Monteverdi Choir’s performances of that period. The soloists sound strangely detached from the proceedings as if their contributions were phoned in from afar and patched into the orchestral fabric–an aesthetic problem, not a sonic one. Nancy Argenta’s tone lacks the warmth required to endear us to a gorgeous aria such as BWV 36’s “Auch mit gedämpften.” Either Teri Dunn (Naxos) or Sibylla Rubens (Harmonia Mundi) is far preferable, with Rubens really capturing the sense of the text and working in complete interpretive sync with her instrumental partners. However, the disc’s biggest drawback is that it sounds as if recorded in a huge cave with an unfriendly, untamable echo that just swallows the choruses and orchestral detail and causes the soloists’ every utterance to lose all semblance of intimacy and focus. The program is well conceived, offering both the Weimar and Leipzig settings of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, plus the two-part Advent cantata that also draws from Luther’s hymn, and whose material Bach used and reused in five different incarnations between 1725 and 1731. It’s hard to recommend this recording when other superior versions are readily available, particularly the Harmonia Mundi disc cited above, which offers exactly the same works in excellent sound–and with performers who really create a sense of occasion appropriate for these hopeful, optimistic works.
