The latest recording in Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage celebrates works written for the Feast of the Purification which falls on February 2, the 40th day after Christmas. Its significance is one of Levitical provenance, a sacrificial ritual where the mother is purified from the uncleanliness of childbirth. Transformed into a Marian festival and then, as Candlemas, into a festival of ‘light to lighten the Gentiles’, the gospel of Luke recalls Mary meeting Simeon in the temple, where he prophesies about the saviour, Christ. Bach wrote three such cantatas, Nos 83, 125 and 82 respectively, for the Feast, between 1724 and 1726, as well as another in the early 1740s, No 200, of which only a single movement survives. Each work resonates rather less with specific Marian themes than with the wondrous consequences of salvation which the Gospel encourages us to contemplate. No 83 is thus an uplifting roulade, ‘a joyful time in the new covenant’, while Ich habe genug (No 82) takes a more meditative view: the longing for death – as Simeon’s Nunc dimittis testifies – and the promises of the kingdom of God.
Bach sought to reflect musically the profound cultural revelations of these age-old statutes and truths, and Gardiner’s thematic programming allows us to ponder Bach’s extraordinarily varied and imaginative response to the texts on a single gospel. Ich habe genug is the work here with the greatest magnetism and one that has attracted many of the finest baritone-basses of recent decades, from Hans Hotter, Fischer-Dieskau (three times) and Jakob Stampfli to Klaus Mertens and, most recently, a stunning reading from Matthias Goerne. Peter Harvey gives a committed and uncompromising account, encircled by oboe-playing of real distinction and meticulously marked-out string articulations. Harvey himself never truly transcends the text, seemingly inhibited by the tactus, and Gardiner pulls the dynamic level back so far at the close that its hush seems almost to belong to another performance. ‘Schlummert ein’ is one of the slowest readings of this slumber aria that exists on record, and without an exceptionally charismatic singer, it sinks into its boots and irradiates too little. More satisfying is the robust No 83 in which Gardiner lets the solo violin and horns parade alongside the dynamic melismas of Robin Tyson’s well-projected countertenor, and in the central aria with the sympathetic tenor of Paul Agnew. Tyson seems less comfortable in an altogether ragged and unGardiner-like No 200.
Mit Fried und Freud (No 125) is a masterpiece whose sustained gravitas Gardiner has clearly considered carefully, but whose effect is somewhat disappointing in the chorale fantasia when compared to Herreweghe’s more sustained 12/8 undercurrent, and his more consequential and polished control of the ephemeral modulations. The anguish of worldly pain could not receive a more graphic review by Bach than in the extensive, subsequent aria, ‘Ich will auch mit gebrochenen Augen’, in which Robin Tyson, save a few intonational blips, is equal to Bach’s tortuous demands of control and expressive dissonance, as are the splendid woodwind players. This is something of a mixed bag, though I will revisit certain individual movements with alacrity.'