Das Falsche Herz

Hermann Max's recording of J. S. Bach: Matthaus Passion with the Rheinische Kantorei and Das Kleine Konzert embodies current orthodoxy in most respects: two choirs of 16 voices each are partnered by two orchestras of comparable size, with period instruments sounding at low (Baroque) pitch; tempos are mostly quite sprightly and textures light; ornamentation is sparing and discreet, but cadential appoggiaturas in the recitatives are mostly in place (though the latest fashion seems to be increasingly to omit them). Christoph Pregardien and Klaus Mertens are ideally cast as the Evangelist and Jesus: precise in diction, judicious in expression. The other soloists are more variable.

… Born in 1933 in Stuttgart, Germany, Helmuth Rilling is an active conductor, pedagogue and ambassador for the music of Bach worldwide. From 1970 to 1984, Mr. Rilling was the first musician to record all of Bach's Cantatas, and was the guiding hand behind the Internationale Bachakademie's critically-acclaimed project to record the complete works of Bach (172 CDs), which was released in 2000 to coincide with the 250th Anniversary of Bach's death. Since 1970, he has been the Artistic Director of the Oregon Bach Festival. In 2003 he became an Honorary Member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. He won a Grammy® Award in 2000 for his recording of Krzystof Penderecki's “Credo” and was again nominated in 2001 for his recording of Wolfgang Rihm's "Deus Passus." In 2008, he was honored with the Sanford Award by the Yale School of Music at Yale University…

The evolving musical climate of the 1950s occasioned a profound shift of culture and attitude in the performance of Bach’s great choral works. By the close of the decade, it was one of Bach’s own successors in the post of Kantor at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche, Karl Richter (who’d become organist there at age 23 in 1947), who’d become torch-bearer for a new generation of Bach interpreters. Richter’s recordings with the Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra (ensembles he founded in 1951 and with which his name has become synonymous) heeded an unbroken Leipzig tradition that could be traced back to the time of Bach himself.

The box-set traces the history of Archiv from 1947, when the first recordings were made (Helmut Walcha playing Bach organ works), to a bonus CD featuring selections from the new 2013 albums mentioned above. A complete overview is appended. In between comes a sequence of albums several of which are new to CD from the great names of the label, from Walcha, Wenzinger and Safford Cape, through Karl Richter, Nikolas Harnoncourt and Sir Charles Mackerras…

It's incredible that a work considered as securely at the core of the Western musical canon as J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion didn't receive a complete recording until after the Second World War, and that prior to that, unabridged performances were exceptionally rare; even Mendelssohn's momentous 1841 Leipzig performance was heavily cut, and Mendelssohn's son reported that even so, much of the audience "fled yawning before it was over." The earliest nearly complete recording was made in 1941 with Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra and Thomanernchor, and those same forces are brought together again, along with the Tölzer Knabenchor, in this 2009 performance led by Riccardo Chailly.

Here, again, Brilliant Classics has licensed recordings of the passions, masses and other works. The St. Matthew and St. John passions are good recordings by the Brandenburg Consort and the King's College Choir; I find these two passions to be a bit weak, and this is a shame.

In this new recording on Archiv, Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli players have offered the polar extreme, adding much to the credibility of recent theories about the small forces Bach employed in his own performances of the work. There is no gilding the lily; just what the score prescribes: 9 singers, one on a part, and a couple dozen players. The sum is a performance that is both lighter than air and deeply moving. Brisk tempi and crystalline textures do everything to highlight what is, after all, the heart of the work: the biblical text and the artful interpolations by Christian Picander. A buoyant organ continue underpins solo playing that is articulate, imitative of the diction of the singers who, for their part, combine natural vocalism with a reverential but never pedantic faithfulness to Bach's score (this is not Handel; Bach tended to write precisely the ornamentation he wanted rather than leave it to notoriously capricious singers).

Gardiner’s reading of the St. Matthew Passion is conceived and executed on the highest level, an example of period practice that is unlikely to be bettered any time soon. The performance as a whole vibrates with life: soloists are first-rate, and wonderfully well chosen for their respective parts, and the work of chorus and orchestra is exemplary. The recording, made in 1988 in the spacious ambience of The Maltings, Snape, near Aldeburgh, is well balanced and exceptionally vivid.