One of the fortuitous consequences of the Historically Informed Performance Practice movement was the discovery that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and his contemporaries was far more intimate than nineteenth-century performance traditions had led us to believe. Even the repertoire of sacred choral music tended to involve solo arias that could be performed as instances of chamber music. Musicologist Joshua Rifkin went as far as to assert that the choral writing could be performed with one singer per line. He made his point with a 1981 Nonesuch recording of the BWV 232 Mass setting in B minor, known affectionately by many of us as the “B Minor Madrigal.”
Yesterday afternoon at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, American Bach Soloists Artistic Director Jeffrey Thomas revisited Bach’s BWV 244 setting of the Passion text from the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, presumably composed for a Good Friday service at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. One-to-a-part was, with only a few exceptions, the order of the day. Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable grandeur in not only the durational scale of this composition but also the emotional intensity of not only Scripture text but also the interleaved poetic mediations on that text.
It did not take long yesterday to appreciate that such rhetorical grandeur was never compromised. The primary reason for this is that the music itself had been scored for a double ensemble: two orchestras with the usual complement of strings, winds, and continuo, each with its own SATB chorus. This division of resources entailed that every instrumental part had a single performer. The American Bach Choir, in turn, consisted of only sixteen vocalists, allowing for two-to-a-part singing by each of the two choruses.
Thomas then went one step further by distributing vocal solos across pairs of vocalists, one group for each of the orchestras. Soprano Hélène Brunet, mezzo Agnes Vojtko, tenor Steven Brennfleck, and bass Jesse Blumberg sat with the chorus members on the left side of the altar, while soprano Katelyn Aungst, countertenor Nicholas Burns, tenor Matthew Hill, and bass Constantine Novotny took their place on the opposite site. This allowed for three-to-a-part singing of choral passages; but, where Thomas felt it appropriate, it also allow a choral passage to be sung as a vocal quartet. The only “inflated” resources consisted of the nine members of the Pacific Boychoir, who sang the cantus firmus line in the first and last movements of the first half of BWV 244.
The result was a richness of rhetoric that consistently underscored the solemnity of the text without ever overloading it. Nevertheless, the journey through the entire score is a long one, clocking in yesterday at about three hours and fifteen minutes, even when Thomas brought a briskness of tempo to his interpretations. While I can appreciate the dramatic motivation for dividing the entire composition into two large parts, I have to say that, towards the end, my body was beginning to complain that a few more breaks might have been in order. On the other hand such additional pauses would have lengthened the overall duration!
The final measures of BWV 244 for Orchestra I with the flute appoggiatura on the upper staff (from the first Bach-Gesellschaft Ausgabe, from IMSLP, public domain)
The fact is that, even as that duration begins to feel a bit of a strain while accounting for the agonies of the Crucifixion, Bach still knew how to recover listener attention with his final grand chorus. This was not just a matter of how he could bring together all of his resources for one last rhetorical gesture. There was also the bittersweet edge he brought to his finale, giving the flutes an appoggiatura through which they sustain a dissonance after all the other resources have resolved the cadence. This was Bach’s final reminder of the grief of the occasion that had been depicted, a grief that would not be resolved until the following Easter Sunday.
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