Bach: Mass in B minor

Julie Roset, Beth Taylor, Lucile Richardot, Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, Christian Immler SmSATB, Pygmalion, Raphaël Pichon
107:21 (2 CDs in a card triptych)
harmonia mundi HMM 902754.55

Everything in this new recording of the B-minor Mass is perfect – clarity, flawless instrumental technique and excellent voices – provided you want a performance that takes the complex compilation of Bach’s final years, treats it as a visionary, near mystical experience and expresses that in an idealised performance that owes much to the massive scale of the late romantic performance tradition. Pichon uses a choir of 12.6.6.6 with 5.5.3.2.1 strings who sing and play all the ‘chorus’ numbers, complete with a dynamic range from pp to ff. The acoustics of the Cathédral Notre-Dame-du-Liban in Paris’s 5th arrondissement are tremendous, giving the fortes – especially the timpani – a huge bloom: the sound engineers have done wonders in bringing both clarity and depth to this performance. This is a grand performance in the grand style: listen to the choir in the Cum Sancto Spiritu for the thrills, and the Credo for the high-octane drama.

This is fair enough in some ways. We have no idea if Bach himself ever heard, let alone directed, a live performance, but suspect he never did. So we can take the coup de théâtre in ‘a work that embraces the world’ (to quote Pichon’s programme notes) as justifying a performance that owes more to a romantic response to this great summary of Bach’s life’s work than to the scholarship and discoveries of the past half century.

There are a number of eccentricities. The change from the Domine Deus to Qui tollis treats these as separate numbers with no discernible relationship between the tempi, and a very mannered final ‘nostram’. And there is a very curious change between the Sanctus, taken in the old and slow = ‘majestic’ style till the singers are unleashed in Pleni to another thrilling display of vocal pyrotechnics with no link in tempo to what went before, reminiscent of early recordings by Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir. For me, these disjunctions reveal fail to deliver that overall coherence which a work like this demands and Pichon claims as a central plank of his performance. Another danger of disregarding the common practice in Bach’s day, when instrumentalists almost always outnumbered singers, is that the model of a choir accompanied by an orchestra means that some orchestral details are obscured. In the Patrem omnipotentem it is really hard to hear the 1st tromba’s entry in bar 29. A similar imbalance pervades the Crucifixus, where the traversi are inaudible amid the thunking string chords, where the theorbo – as in the Incarnatus – has a big impact on the texture.

Among the high points for me are the solo numbers where the issues of balance are less in your face: the wonderful Lucile Richardot’s Qui sedes, where her sense of the rhythmic complexities and interplay with the oboe d’amore are second to none, and Agnus Dei is a model of well balanced musicmaking with her near-miraculous breath control. The Benedictus, with Emiliano Gonzales Toro, is poised and elegant, using the acoustics to smooth over the long lines of both voice and traverso. The harpsichord (and theorbo) in Quoniam keeps the sprightly tempo on track, and Christian Immler is in great voice, even if the style is a long way from what was being explored in those exciting days in the 1970s, when he sang as a boy alto in Teldec’s pioneering Cantata recordings under Harnoncourt and Leonhardt. He is less comfortable in Et in Spiritum sanctum, where it feels as if he is trying to hold back the tempo in pursuit of rather more lyrical delivery. At the end of the nimble Confiteor, the adagio is prepared for with a massive rallentando and Pichon wallows in the chromaticisms, and slows even more in bar 138; at the end of the Et expecto resurrectionem there’s absolutely no rallentando at all, in contrast to many other final cadences.

I hope these comments help give readers a feel for this recording. In many ways, it is so good, and it is certainly full-blooded. But I cannot commend to EMR readers Pichon’s almost total disregard for what we have learnt over the past fifty years about Bach’s careful balancing between voices and instruments in his scoring that illustrates his desire for clarity and audibility. Welding a period instrument band onto a large modern chorus of trained singers, however talented, demonstrates what a range of complexities face the director of any actual performance. Unless your prime motivation is to let the music speak for itself, mantras like ‘a work that embraces the world’ continue to provide directors with an excuse for promoting their personal vision rather than trying to reveal Johann Sebastian’s: Soli Deo Gloria was his mantra at all times.

David Stancliffe