Masaaki Suzuki was this year’s Artist in Residence at the Utrecht Festival, and this was the first of two concerts with his Bach Collegium Japan. As ever, we heard some excellent playing and singing from the orchestra, its choir and soloists in an all-Magnificat programme featuring works by Kuhnau, Zelenka and J. S. Bach.
Kuhnau, Bach’s predecessor in Leipzig, opened the performance. His Magnificat is a polite piece, and it was played politely, although with the Bach Collegium’s usual impeccable ensemble and attention to detail. It is in fact Kuhnau’s largest sacred vocal work; he is remembered more for his keyboard music, amongst which the Biblische Historien, and numerous smaller-scale vocal works. In some ways, one could hear echoes of Bach in Kuhnau’s music, but the style of the older composer is, generally, simpler and less succinct.
From the start, the acoustic of the hall did not favour either voices or bass instruments, which created some imbalance in the sound as a whole. The singers seemed to have had a particularly hard time: soprano Joanne Lunn over-compensated with gesture and enthusiasm; soprano Hannah Morrison under-compensated and initially came across as timid; and tenor Makoto Sakurada had a fine tone, but suffered from muddy diction and articulation.
However, it is more to Suzuki’s credit than the hall’s difficulties that his choir sounded throughout as if they were only single voices (they were in fact two, three or four to a part, plus soloists). This occasionally made balance with the orchestra tricky, but in general, they sang as one instrument; only Lunn’s voice stood out from the crowd now and then when she sang with the choir. Their common rhythm and phrasing was superb, and their sound, whilst not the most generous, was pure and clean.
The orchestra, too, suffered from an acoustic imbalance, mainly between the ringing high instruments and the somewhat murky lower instruments. The upper strings and woodwind, ever-reliable, did a sterling job, but the continuo section was hard to hear and somewhat masked by the physical position of the wind. They played as one, but sometimes too much care was taken at the expense of expression; Lunn’s energy in Kuhnau’s Et exultavit, for example, was not quite matched by a deadpan accompaniment, especially from the oboes.
Jan Dismas Zelenka (an honorary German who is normally claimed by the Czechs as their leading Baroque composer) followed Kuhnau with two of his three Magnificats, ZVW 107 in C and ZWV 108 in D. (His third setting, ZWV 106 in a minor, has been lost.) Zelenka is not as widely known as Bach and Kuhnau, principally because all his works were purchased by Maria Josepha of Austria upon his death. They were thereafter ‘kept under lock and key as something very rare’, according to Telemann in correspondence to Pisendel in April 1756, after the two had tried, unsuccessfully, to get Zelenka’s Responsoria published. However, Zelenka was well respected by his contemporaries: Bach himself received the Czech as a guest at his home, and later instructed his son, W.F. Bach, to copy the Amen from ZWV 108 for performance in Leipzig.
The only Roman Catholic amongst tonight’s composers (Bach and Kuhnau were both unwaveringly Lutheran), Zelenka’s music was more immediately appealing than Kuhnau’s for its varied orchestration, unexpected harmonies and twists of phrase. The second Magnificat, ZWV 108 (actually the earlier work, written in 1725), showed a master contrapuntist at work, but the performance itself had a hectic feel to it, and the myriad layers did not always come through. Hannah Morrison, the soprano soloist in ZWV 107, seemed to be on the cusp of losing control in the fast passages, and her voice took on a slightly harsh quality now and then. On the other hand, alto soloist Margot Oitzinger shone in ZWV 108 with an exquisitely phrased Suscepit Israel.
Interestingly, Zelenka gave tempo markings as titles to each movement of both pieces, and the Magnificat in D includes only three sections of the liturgy: Magnificat anima mea Dominum, Suscepit Israel and the final Amen. With this in mind, it was a pity that the contrast between the opening movement in this work, which is titled Allegro, and the closing Amen, entitled Presto, was not more marked. As first-rate as the Bach Collegium and their director are, one sometimes longed for more of everything: more differences in tempo and dynamic, more colours and above all, more risk. But risk is neither the Bach Collegium’s nor Suzuki’s forte, and they settled instead for a splendidly polished, unified performance, livelier and more engaged than we had heard in the Kuhnau.
Bach’s Magnificat, which towered over both Kuhnau and Zelenka’s music, ended the programme. Written for Christmas 1723 in his first year in Leipzig, it was originally in E-flat (BWV 243a). Bach returned to it for the feast of the Visitation in 1733, at which time he rewrote it in D and changed some of the instrumentation. Where in some of his large-scale sacred choral works Bach is imposing and expansive, the Magnificat is comparatively compact, and his writing here is subtler and more economical.
It is a work which suits the Bach Collegium down to the ground. Morrison recovered her form and both she and Lunn gave us a splendidly assured performance; Oitzinger and the flutes sparkled during the Esurientes; and Sakurada, although not quite as powerful as earlier in the concert, had a lovely fluidity, particularly during the Et misericordia. Jean-François Madeuf, who with Gilles Rapin and Joel Iahens had played the trumpet so heroically throughout, began to tire at the start of the Magnificat, but soon rallied and made it to the end in fine voice. Special mention must also go to timpanist Philip Tarr, whose energetic dancing and wonderfully rhythmic playing was captivating throughout the concert, and once more to alto Margot Oitzinger, who, one felt, could have stood onstage in the middle of an earthquake and still provided us with an serenely opulent, precise performance.
Balance problems persisted to the last, especially for the bass instruments and voices, and the Bach Collegium lost energy during the Sicut and at the start of the Gloria; but Suzuki, who is nothing if not a master of control, kept the pace up and swept his group to a grand finish.