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Reviewer:
David Vickers
The
discography of Bach’s motets is as extensive and diverse as that devoted to any
iconic set of Baroque choral masterpieces. It has been many years since it
seemed viable to take sides about whether chamber choirs (with adult female
singers on the top line), church or college choirs (with boy trebles) or
slimline minimal approaches are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Capella Cracoviensis, under
guest director Fabio Bonizzoni, deploy eight single voices. Leanly balanced
contrapuntal textures and crisp diction abound, and there is an astute sense of
light and shade. The fugue at the core of Der Geist hilft has articulate vigour,
and the rhythms of the opening declamations to sing praises in Singet dem Herrn
are lightly sprung. The weighted phrasing and flexible ebb and flow of pulse in
Jesu, meine Freude make for a compellingly urgent argument but one that does not
always conclude with completely satisfying answers (for instance, the running
bass voice part and swaying upper voices in ‘So aber Christus’ lack
compassionate mysticism – although it is achieved sweetly in ‘Gute Nacht, o
Wesen’). The ensemble’s voices often have a firm vibrato that colours the music
warmly, but the lushness of texture in places such as the antiphonal exchanges
in Komm, Jesu, komm (taken fairly briskly by Bonizzoni) also wobble with some
flawed tuning.
The Choir of St Thomas’s, New York fields nearly 50 singers. Half of these are
boy trebles, so the top line is always sustained smoothly; the lower-voice parts
tend to be subservient, providing support rather than achieving absolute
polyphonic equality. Soloists are used expediently for the florid passages in
juxtaposition to full chorale phrases during the middle movement of Singet dem
Herrn. John Scott’s measured pacing yields harmonic clarity during the
alternating double-choir sections in Komm, Jesu, komm, the choir juxtaposes
clarity in florid passages with cathartic cadential resolutions in Der Geist
hilft, and the dynamic range between whispered fugue and grand homophonic
conclusion in Fürchte dich nicht is enthralling, albeit perhaps a mite
contrived. The continuo trio of cello, double bass and organ inevitably has a
more distant share of the textural pie than the prevalence of the instruments on
the bass-line in the chamber-scale Polish recording. Each survey includes Ich
lasse dich nicht, for many years misattributed to Bach’s father’s cousin Johann
Christoph; the crystal-clear spatial distinction between the two choirs in the
New York recording yields a gently profound effect, whereas Capella Cracoviensis’
double quartet of singers sound more homogenised and are placed at the
foreground.
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