This is the sixth recording of Bach cantata performances from the Montréal Baroque Festival. Four discs – from the 2004 Festival onward – have previously been available in the UK, the last one appearing seven years ago. The present disc is a long-delayed offering from the 2009 Festival; another from the 2010 Festival exists, but is not available here – you have to go to Amazon.fr or Amazon.ca if you want it.
All the recordings so far were attractive to listeners and critics interested in Bach performance. The singers were uniformly excellent and stylish – the participation of English tenor Charles Daniels speaks for itself – and the band as good an HIP group as any in Europe. Eric Milnes was a very competent director, one who had much more sense of direction than Koopman without laying on the lash in the Gardiner manner. The USP of the discs was that they offered one-voice-per-part performances which were not only persuasive, but were delivered in an obviously large acoustic – a big basilica in Quebec, as big as Bach's own church. This is in contrast to (say) Sigiswald Kuijken's OVPP Bach Cantatas, which have a distinctly chamber-music feel. The big acoustic does make a real difference. The singers have to go full out in the ensemble numbers, and this in turn makes for clarity of line rather than a blended sound; a quite different effect to that of a choir, even a good chamber choir. The only other recording I know where one can hear this is Joshua Rifkin's disc of Weimar cantatas on Dorian.
Of course these musicological niceties would be meaningless if good music-making was not on offer, but Eric Milnes' team has so far produced first-rate results, and they continue to do so here in Cantatas 68, 173, 174, and 184, meant for the minor days of Whitsun at Leipzig in 1724, 1725 and 1729. There is a predominance of flute tone – presumably the trumpeters were still in the bar – and this opens our ears to the width of Bach's stylistic reach. Listen to the start of 184 "Erwünschtes Freudenlicht" – a dreamy accompagnato for tenor and flutes – and you could believe yourself in a Gluck opera. The noisy exception to the calm is the opening concerto to 174 "Ich liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte", an hilarious beefing-up by Bach of his 3rd Brandenburg with horns and a squad of oboes.
But. There has to be a substantial health warning on these "new" performances from 2009. Milnes clearly decided to experiment that year with an interpretative technique which many will find distasteful; I certainly found it obtrusive. He marks paragraphs in movements with brief pausing commas. "Gramophone" magazine calls these "agogic hesitations", but to you and me they just sound like lurches, lurches violent enough to bring on travel sickness. I know why he does it. In a Bach concerted movement – Brandenburg 3 is a prime example – the player can feel as if trapped in a music-box, being played rather than playing. Milnes wants to break out of the box, but his escape is too violent. The concerto in Cantata 174 is the worst example of this, but the soprano aria in Cantata 68, the famous "My heart ever faithful" is another notable victim, a great shame, as Monika Mauch's singing here is wonderful. There are other instances, but these are the worst, and that they are the best-known music here suggests Milnes was unfortunately keen to "make a difference".
I still feel that these performances are worth hearing, the more so as the cantatas are not well-known and contain charming music. The good news is that the lurching was new in 2009 – none of the previous recordings was so disfigured – and that Milnes dropped it in 2010. This makes the 2010 disc "Cantates pour L'Épiphanie" (at the moment available only in Francophone countries) even more desirable than this. It also has the advantage of employing Franziska Gottwald, an excellent true contralto not heard enough.
Both the 2009 and 2010 discs have first-class engineering but are just CD's [the first four discs, still available, were hybrid SACD's].
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