Bach Christmas Oratorio

Christmas Oratorio is topical, it’s also universal. It doesn’t require lights or tinsel or presents under the tree to instruct, inspire, and/or entertain, especially if it is presented in as fine a performance as this one fashioned by Stephen Layton and his cohort. Layton is the director of music at Trinity College, Cambridge (having succeeded Richard Marlow), and his choir is top-notch, as is the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, mercifully identified as OAE. OAE’s roster is rife with such familiar names from the period instruments movement as Margaret Faultless (who is just that here) and Alison Bury. To mention Anthony Robson, oboe, and David Blackadder, trumpet, is not to slight any of the other players.

In the historic Weimar Herder Church Sir John Eliot Gardiner finds the perfect setting for his recording of the Bach Christmas Oratorio. Against the backdrop of the dramatic altar and Lucas Granach paintings, the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists perform Gardiner's new interpretation of this classic piece. With this interpretation of the Christmas Oratorio, Gardiner shows himself once again to be an incontestible specialist of Bach's music.

The recommending word for Philip Pickett and the New London Consort's recording of J. S. Bach's Christmas Oratorio is balance. There is a most satisfying balance on every level of this recording-between singers, between singers and instrumentalists, and between instrumentalists. Pickett mediates between the extreme options for choral forces-one per part at one extreme and a mammoth Romantic-sized choir at the other-by placing several singers on each choral part and drawing his soloists from that choir. Listening to the chorales and chorus movements of Bach's monumental creation will reveal the wisdom of Pickett's decision.

This isn't an oratorio in the Handelian sense, but a series of cantatas for various days from Christmas to Epiphany. Bach's music is loaded with treats: an echo aria for soprano and oboe; a "pastoral" sinfonia; bravura arias for tenor with flute and bass with trumpet; a giddy soprano-bass duet; a transporting lullaby for alto.

Harry Christophers and The Sixteen present a vivid and joyful account of the Christmas story in this recording; Mark Padmore makes another appearance in the Evangelist role, with Michael George a convincing Herod and Libby Crabtree an appropriately light-voiced Angel.

J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio was written for the Christmas season of 1734, and although it incorporates music from earlier works it belongs firmly among his timeless large-scale compositions. The development of the oratorio, which was to become a new musical form in Protestant church services at that time, was stimulated by Bach’s compositions, particularly by the unusual form of his six-part Christmas Oratorio. From its famously joyful opening ‘Jauchzet frohlocket’ to the arrival of the Wise Men from the East, this work’s enduring popularity has long proven its status as a choral ‘evergreen.’