Bach Gardiner

Deutsche Grammophon presents a complete survey of Sir John Eliot Gardiner's recordings for Achiv Produktion and DG. Orchestras & Choirs: Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantic, the Wiener Philharmoniker, NDR-Chor, NDR Sinfonieorchester, and the London Symphony Orchestra. Soloists include: Anne Sofie von Otter, Ian Bostridge, Barbara Bonney, Emma Kirkby, Mark Padmore, Bernarda Fink, Magdalena Kozena, Bryn Terfel, and many more.

In this recording of Bach’s Suite No. 1, John Eliot Gardiner follows Passepieds I and II with Bach’s own setting of the chorale Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen BWV 299. The joyous text celebrates praise and discipleship, prolonging the suite’s exuberant mood. No other recorded version features a vocal tailpiece, but if you don’t like it, simply program your player to skip track 8. It’s good to find both parts of the Overtures to these works repeated (Frans Brüggen omits second-section repeats), but at times Gardiner can seem too rugged and unyielding for what is, after all, ceremonial or occasional music.

Taking the Bach cantatas as a basis for a year-long pilgrimage in 2000, conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner led the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists on an emotional and artistically triumphant world tour to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the composer's death. These performances feature Cantatas 179, 199, and 113, all composed for the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, in marvelously dramatic interpretations by the choir and soloists, including soprano Magdalena Kozen, alto William Towers, tenor Mark Padmore, and bass Stephan Loges.

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.

Although conductors invariably include the six great motets of Bach (BWV225-230) in recordings of these works, they seldom if ever seem to agree which if any other of Bach's motets to perform with them. John Eliot Gardiner very sensibly goes for the lot, adding Sei Lob und Preis mit Ehren (BWV231) and the little-known Der Gerechte kommt um which does not even have the benefit of a Schmieder number. As well as these, Gardiner also includes two short pieces which belong, at least nominally, to the cantata category, BWV50 and BWV118. In the case of the latter there is much justification for doing so for it's a single movement choral piece in motet style written for a funeral in about 1736 and revised for a performance around 1740.

After the completion of the magisterial touring sequence of Bach cantatas from conductor John Eliot Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, it seems that the prolific music-making will continue with non-cantata works. This strong recording of Bach's Easter Oratorio, BWV 249, was released just in time for the 2014 Easter holiday and should find the same demand as the rest of Gardiner's output. The Easter Oratorio is more an oversized cantata than a full-scale treatment with narrator, chorus, and soloists in the manner of Bach's other large religious works; it has no narrating Evangelist, consists mostly of solos in dialogue with each other, and apparently was actually adapted from an earlier pastoral birthday cantata.

Few ensembles can come to Bach's St John Passion with quite the degree of performance-based insight that Gardiner and his musicians have done. Written for Good Friday in 1724, the passion was the centrepiece of Bach's year-long cycle of liturgical cantatas. Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir spent 2000 performing and recording these surrounding cantatas, before recording this disc in 2003. The result is a little slice of musical heaven. In sound, it's a masterpiece of technical precision and musical beauty. In tone, it perfectly balances the theatrical with the devotional. The English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir expertly build and release tension, their phrases shaped to sound natural, instinctive, and emotionally complete. The work's many dramatic contrasts are also brilliantly done.