John Eliot Gardiner has chosen to give Carissimi oratorios the celebrity treatment he has usually reserved for Monteverdi, Handel and, of course, Mozart. And so he should: his patronage of these works will ensure they are more widely heard and appreciated than ever before. The music is performed with lavish resources; the continuo complement alone (harp, lutes, bowed basses and keyboards), not to mention the addition of His Majesties Sagbutts and Cornetts, enables Gardiner to intensify the contrasts of mood and characterization so abundant on every page of Carissimi's scores. As with the 1987 Meridian performances by Paul McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort and Players, Graham Dixon has prepared the editions and advised on the recordings. But this time no Frescobaldi organ prefaces Jephte and the ornamentation is more sparingly applied. Ironically, in spite of the polish Gardiner expertly applies, he fails to generate the warmth conveyed in the earlier recording.
In the clarity and immediacy of the choral singing, Gardiner's Monteverdi Choir is perhaps without peer. His sensitivity to the text, with its quicksilver changes of mood, demands admiration. The stile concitato chorus (''Fugite'') near the beginning of Jephte and the spine-tingling choral lament at the end; the powerful 'weather' chorus (''Et proeliabantur venti'') and the wonderfully sustained ''Peccavimus'' of Jonas are of course among the highlights. The performances of the stirring ''Tunc, horribili sonitu'' and the exquisite use of dissonance in ''Quam magna, quam amara, quam terribilis'' of the less well-known apocalyptic Judicium extremum are, however, equally memorable. The performers of the duets of angels here, Ruth Holton and Susan Hemington Jones, trim their tone to sound remarkably like boys; Holton is even more convincing as the virgin daughter of Jephte, conveying great courage, delicately and without sentimentality, in the dialogue with her father and the ensuing lament, ''Plorate colles''. Mark Tucker's performance as Jonah, especially when addressing the Lord, is deeply moving.
The booklet would seem, perhaps, to have gone overboard in redressing the lack of translation and a proper note to accompany the earlier Meridian recording by providing three translations and two strangely over-lapping essays by the two leading Carissimi experts, Dr Andrew V. Jones of Cambridge and Graham Dixon of the BBC. Altogether an embarrassment of riches.'