How apt that this disc should arrive amidst our 250th anniversary commemorations of Bach’s death. For no one did more to awaken the world to his genius than Mendelssohn, who even as a child played his fugues, and was only 20 when he conducted the first performance of the St Matthew Passion since Bach’s death. Mendelssohn was also instrumental in the erection of a statue to Leipzig’s great Kapellmeister, and, of still greater importance, unearthed innumerable manuscripts stored away in Berlin’s Singakademie.
It should not be forgotten that for a while Mendelssohn himself, appointed by the King of Prussia, was in charge of Berlin’s church music. So it is scarcely surprising that Bach’s influence on his thinking is most clearly revealed in his shorter church works – manifest chiefly through his possession of ‘the power, by no means common in the 19th century, of writing in a contrapuntal style without an air of self-conscious archaism’, as Philip Radcliffe once put it.
Only once or twice in this choice and excellently recorded selection of unaccompanied psalms, motets and the like is there a suspicion that contrapuntal ingenuity takes over when feeling fails. For the most part it is Mendelssohn’s personal response, often expressed through telling contrasts of male and female or solo and choral voices, that gives age-old texts new life, as so arrestingly in ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me’ and ‘In the middle of life we are in death’.
Performance itself plays no small part. And I have nothing but praise for Berlin’s RIAS Chamber Choir, both in vocal quality – not forgetting their soaring sopranos – and their finely nuanced, flexible phrasing under the dedicated direction of the English-born Marcus Creed. Warmly recommended.'