Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1705)
Magnificat in D, BWV243 [24:58]
Robert Maximilian HELMSCHROTT (b.1938)
Lumen [40:59]
Simon Mayr Chorus
Concerto de Bassus/Franz Hauk
rec. 2017, Kongregationssaal, Neuberg, Germany
NAXOS 8.579049 [65:57]
For those of us who remember the one-voice-to-a-part Bach performances promulgated by Joshua Rifkin in the 1980s, this new recording of the Bach Magnificat will seem very familiar (although, to be fair, most of the big choruses are sung with two voices to each part). While Rifkin’s academic arguments about the performing practices of Bach’s time are most compelling, I remain sceptical that effectively ignoring developments in performance practice since then makes for equally compelling listening to 21st century ears with their long exposure to the bloated worlds of Wagner, Mahler, et al. Bach shorn of colour, breadth and tonal variety might mimic the sort of noise it made in the 1730s, but we don’t have the ears of our 1730s predecessors, and to my way of thinking this light, desiccated style of performance lacks sufficient aural impact to sound anything other than stringy. While this is not the forum, tempting as it is, to debate the pros and cons of Bach performance scholarship, I have no doubt that a lot of listeners will find in Franz Hauk’s reduced-forces breeze through the Bach Magnificent little to entice them away from other, more opulent sounding and festive-inspired recordings, while those who do enjoy this more refined and acetic style will find the quality of this performance offers little to improve on what is already available. You can have limited resources yet still make fulsome music, as John Butt proves most eloquently on his outstanding recording of the Magnificat (albeit in its E flat major manifestation) on Linn CKD469.
Hauk’s very brisk speeds serve only to underline the thinness of the vocal sound and, at times, the shallowness of the performance; it seems to skate over the notes with little real sense of interpretative insight. At times, the singers seem overstretched – the opening of the “Gloria” seems decidedly unkempt, while, for all its onomatopoeic qualities, the milling crowds evoked in the “Omnes generations” sound more like bickering shop-keepers. The 10 members of the Simon Mayr Chorus are each fine enough as individual singers, and some – notably Andreas Mattersberger who is a model of geniality in “Quia fecit mihi magna” and Florence Losseau whose diction is impeccable in “esurientes” – exude a strong and distinctive vocal presence, but in ensemble they lack both blend and a consistent approach to the music. Theresa Holzhauser slides in and out of focus against the rather hard-edged tone of Robert Sellier in the duet “et misericordia”, while the choral lines of “fecit potentiam” suffer from a surfeit of vocal individuality, not least in an almost embarrassing descent through the word “dispersit”.
The general thinness and superficiality of this Bach performance is only heightened by the sense that it is included both as a make-weight for the CD and as an enticement to a public unenticed by the prospect of a 40-minute “interfaith dialogue” by a commentary composer. Yet if the notion of a large-scale choral work with a modern socio-political message (think Michael Berkeley’s Or Shall We Die?) seems in any way off-putting, on both a musical as well as a performance level, this is a compelling recording which more than compensates for any disappointments found in the Bach.
Lumen dates from 2017 and is a conscious attempt to unify within the musical genre of an oratorio, elements central to the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths. Writing this review the day after the appalling massacre of Muslims in New Zealand, the German-born Helmschrott’s rhetorical question “Why should it upset us if a religious Muslim woman wears a burqa in our country?” takes on a special resonance which might give the music more emotional impact in the wake of that atrocity as well as in the current climate of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (not to mention the recent bombings of Christian churches and their congregations in Indonesia, Egypt and Pakistan), but music usually outlives passing negative trends in society, and if and when such inter-religious hatreds are a thing of the past (or, at least, a thing not of the present) I think this is a musical work which will still have an impact; not so much for its text as for the quality of Helmschrott’s obviously impassioned response to it. A response which finds an equally impassioned and committed advocacy in Franz Hauk and his musicians.
There is no sense here of the thinness so evident in the Bach; a consequence of the composer’s clever use of the orchestral and vocal resources, as well of Hauk’s sympathetic handling of this often expansive score. There are some lovely moments – a dramatic violin cadenza and some magically atmospheric orchestral effects in the second of the three movements, a wonderfully luxuriant bit of choral writing (accompanied with what sound suspiciously like a swanee whistle) around 4:10 of the third movement, and that movement’s ethereal Messiaen-like piano postlude played by Helmschrott himself – but overall this is a rich, varied, distinctive and powerfully emotive work which deserves the widest possible hearing – especially in these days of troubled inter-faith relations.
Marc Rochester
