Gardiner’s Bach hasn’t worn especially well. It’s fast, brilliant, disciplined, and almost completely expressionless. His recording of the Magnificant has an impersonal, steely urgency strangely at odds with the Virgin Mary’s prayer of gratitude on learning that she would bear the Christ child. Listen to the frantic scramble he makes of “Omnes generationes,” the counterpoint blurred and ill-balanced, or to the frankly goofy sounding treatment of the ritornello in “Quia fecit mihi magna.”
The soloists are all fine, except for Charles Brett’s ghastly male alto. Why in heaven’s name tolerate a vocal quality this awful when you have women sopranos and choristers? Heaven knows there’s nothing “period” about it. Emma Kirkby’s account of Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen matches Gardiner in ruthless efficiency. Her flutelike tone conveys no joy in the concluding Alleluia, merely a fierce determination to get through it at speed without making a fool of herself. She doesn’t hold a candle to Arlene Auger in Rilling’s glowing performance. The sonics, as harsh and glaring as the performances themselves, haven’t been improved by remastering. Adding insult to injury Philips 50, as my colleague Victor Carr recently wrote, seems to mean discs of no more than 50 minutes as much as a selection of the label’s best recordings. No matter how you look at it, this disc offers no bargain.
