Bach: Weihnachtsoratorium BWV 248 (CD)

CD of the Month: Gramophone, Dec 2007

“Above all it’s Finley who sings overwhelmingly, you won’t hear these numbers better on record.” Münchner Merkur

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach
Conductor: Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Performers:

Christine Schäfer
Bernarda Fink
Werner Güra
Gerald Finley
Christian Gerhaher
Arnold Schoenberg Choir
Concentus Musicus Wien

Recorded: 8, 9, 10 December 2006, Vienna
Released: 9 November 2007
Number of Discs: 2
Label: Deutsches Harmonia Mundi
ASIN: B001E1TGA4

What the critics say

Geoff Brown, The Times, 30 November 2007

Rating: Four out of five stars

I have a wobbling pile of Christmas releases waiting for attention, seasonal exotica from all points of the compass. But nothing deserves being wrapped as much as Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s new version of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, recorded with stellar soloists and the Concentus Musicus Wien. The presentation is luxurious. The booklet pages gleam with gold paint – hell, unfortunately, for reading the texts.

There are five Christmas cards, of no significance. The discs, though, are a big blast of warmth and uplift, to a degree unexpected from a conductor famously fond of the nervous, the strident, and the dramatic. True, in the choral movements the Arnold Schoenberg Choir echo those lurching Harnoncourt dynamics that first tried some ears in his Bach performances 30 years ago. But, bathed in the gentle and friendly acoustic of Vienna’s Musikverein, the music still flows and smiles, at an unhurried pace, as any retelling of the Christmas story should.

Werner Güra’s Evangelist gets down to business early in the six cantatas. Reaching the word “ schwanger” (pregnant), he dips into an expressive hush – first of many expressive touches in his supple narration. Bernarda Fink’s high pointarrives in the second cantata, when she lullabies baby Jesus with an instantly affecting and honeyed calm. The bass part is shared between Gerald Finley, especially eloquent, and Christian Gerhaher. The Soprano Christine Schäfer misses some lustre occasionally, but certainly not when she sings her aria Nur ein Wink.

The Concentus musicians play a key part in maintaining the light, glowing, open texture Harnoncourt seeks. The period-instrument woodwinds, piquantly burbling, always remind us that this is a pastoral story, involving shepherds watching flocks. No sound is hard-driven; can this be the same Harnoncourt who gave us a white-knuckle Matthew Passion seven years ago?

For some listeners, there will still be mannerisms that could cut into the pleasure of repeated listenings: maybe those seesaw dynamics. But place this set next to past period-instrument performances of the work, even Harnoncourt’s own, and it stands victorious. The reasons boil down to two simple words: joy and radiance.

Richard Wigmore, The Telegraph, 8 December 2007

The best of the new releases: Bach, Vaughan Williams and more…

The age of Bach and Handel saw no rigid musical divide between sacred and profane. Just as Messiah pilfers amorous Italian duets, so the Christmas Oratorio recycles music from secular cantatas. While Bach’s congregation would not have batted an eyelid, scholars – including Alfred Dürr in the booklet note to this new recording – have turned intellectual somersaults trying to “rationalise” the borrowings.

The test, of course, is whether the recycled numbers fit their new context. Which they do, triumphantly. Thus a chorus from a royal birthday cantata happily morphs into the oratorio’s opening paean of praise, while a ravishing aria sung to the infant Hercules becomes a lullaby for Jesus.

With his superb Viennese forces eating out of his hand, Harnoncourt has an unerring feel for Bach’s rhetoric, and for the lilt of the dance that suffuses the oratorio. The trumpet-and-drum-festooned celebratory choruses go with a terrific swing. But what repeatedly strikes the ear is the uncommon grace and affection of the music-making: in, say, the celestial choral minuet that opens Part 4, or the rarefied playfulness of the opening chorus of Part 5, where the oboes and voices frolic in chamber-musical dialogue.

Harnoncourt’s impressive-looking solo line-up lives up to its billing. Werner Güra is a mellifluous and involved narrator. Like all the soloists, he is acutely alive to the colour and meaning of the words. Christine Schäfer is at her most radiant, Bernarda Fink sings the cradle song with mingled tenderness and elation, while Gerald Finley brings nobility without bluster to the other “hit” aria, “Grosser Herr”. The recording has its occasional eccentric Harnoncourtisms. But as a luminous vision of Bach’s joyous masterpiece, it becomes a top recommendation.

Michael Kennedy, Sunday Telegraph, 23 December 2007

The Christmas Oratorio is a collection of six cantatas. It is rare to hear it in one session as Nikolaus Harnoncourt has recorded it here, with one glorious Item succeeding another, all sung and played with that sense of period style that Harnoncourt commands so effortlessly. The Vienna Concentus Musicus are in sparkling form, as is the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, giving the chorales a very special depth of feeling. The soloists are a dream team: tenor Werner Gura’s tone is pure, unforced and plangent. The bass, Christian Gerhaher, has a pleasing, lightish voice and the baritone is Gerald Finley, as always secure in tone and immaculate in diction. Christine Schafer brings a boyish timbre to the soprano arias, and the alto arias are sung by the incomparable Bernarda Fink. The recording is superb, and the set is distributed in the UK by Sony/BMG



Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, Gramophone Disc of the Month

A radiant, original and distinctive reading of the Christmas Oratorio

History has not judged kindly the revisiting of major Bach choral works by eminent conductors. Here is the exception. Nikolaus Harnoncourt recorded the Christmas Oratorio 35 years ago (and there was a live Unitel video in 1981) but this is a musician whose third reading of the St Matthew Passion in 2000 plumbed depths of understanding and characterisation of a quite different order from his previous accounts. Likewise, this significant and richly endowed contribution to the catalogue, whose defining rationale is the exploration of the Oratorio’s joyous and elegant poetic fervour, asks similarly penetrating questions. These are different challenges to the Passions in that Bach’s careful assembling of material for six “parts” or cantatas provides no obviously sustained “action” but, rather, tableaux from the majesty of Christ’s birth and the annunciation of the shepherds to the coming of the Three Wise Men as Epiphany approaches. Binding the themes and harnessing the material into an integrated whole for a single sitting (not necessarily inimical to Bach’s planning, despite being spread over the six Feast Days of Christmas, I 734- 35) takes more than just a few well judged tempi and a generic Yuletide esprit.

Harnoncourt’s recording, taken from live performances in the Musikverein last Christmas, succeeds in this regard with uncanny freshness and generosity. Without a hint of world-weariness, each movement builds on the experience of what has been heard before (a device encouraged by Bach in his emollient and atmospheric instrumentation, and the decisive connections between each cantata). Bachians who know Harnoncourt’s Passion recordings will recognise the distinctive southern European classical tradition which has been brought to bear on his recent Bach performances. Witness the soft-grained radiance and ease, whether Mass or opera-inspired, which eschews an inward-looking and parochial outlook. Indeed, Harnoncourt is unique in his decisively pictorial and luminous landscape (in the more perennial oratorio tradition), alongside a highly developed ear for charring the work with kaleidoscopic, if occasionally maverick character. The springy choruses are bright but warm, spacious and unhurried, and packed with cathartic and lyrical dialogues between instruments and voices. The arias are also consistently probing, with fine perfonnances from Christine Schäfer (“Nur ein Wink” is irresistible) and Bernarda Fink, whose “Schlafe” lives up to expectations (though one perhaps questions whether the faster speeds of the ritornelli reveal some patching).

Werner Güra’s narration takes a little time to warm up but by Part 2 he is in full swing with both unequivocal delivery and an impressive bravura in the unwieldy “Frohe Hirten”. Gerald Finley sings with open-hearted zeal and, despite occasional flatness, teams up touchingly with Schäfer in “Herr, dein Mitleid”. There is the odd rough edge and, inevitably, there are moments which will not be to everyone’s taste. But the unforced sweep of grandeur, complementing supple pastoral mosaics, marks out Harnoncourt’s Christmas Oratorio as a valuable and penetrating seasonal vision.

Münchner Merkur, 5 December 2007 (Markus Thiel)

Translated by Ursula Turecek

All of this was not meant to be like this

Obviously something went wrong here. Ok, the monumental style à la Karajan and Richter that celebrated Bach with lugubrious tempi and great instrumentation, is a dead duck – incited above all by Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s revolutionary performances. But the backlash overreached: In a cramped effort not to arouse the suspicion of romanticism even Weihnachtsoratorium wears out in a harmlessly bouncing hum-ta-ta, as we will experience again this month.

This boasts itself “swinging”, “swaying” or “musically slim”. A notion that ultimately relies on the zeitgeisty “easy listening”: It is catchy at once. And the subject matters?

Harnoncourt’s new recording of the cantata-hit is just in the nick of time. A recording that sounds as if the 78 year-old (!) wanted to call out to his musical sons and grandsons: Wait a moment, all of this was not meant to be like this.

The live recording with Concentus Musicus and Arnold Schönberg-Chor was made one year ago at the Vienna Musikverein. And what makes you prick up your ears at very first are the tempi: Where the colleagues understand “Jauchzet, frohlocket” or “Herrscher des Himmels” in common time Harnoncourt thwarts the proceedings. The same in the “Ehre”-choirs (that are presented often as a turbo exhibition) and in some arias.

This is irritating – and amazing. Suddenly you hear how much is lost in all this racy speed. What work is possible with the middle parts, which indispensable counter movements and instrumental dialogues Bach has written into the score.

Harnoncourt demonstrates in “Herrscher des Himmels” for example that the hautboys are as important as the trumpets that dominate in the cliché of “festive baroque”.

No number becomes a metronomic self-runner, the tempo never simply locks. The aria “Flößt mein Heiland” comes to a halt again and again and not only in the final chorale Harnoncourt finds soft phrases that deny the piece every martial quality. It’s here that Harnoncourt – much as the differences – becomes congenial to Celibidache who always made music come into existence out of relaxation.

Harnoncourt had the best possible cast of soloists to his disposal: Christine Schäfer (soprano), Bernarda Fink (mezzo), Werner Güra (tenor), Gerald Finley (baritone soli in cantatas 1 – 3) and Christian Gerhaher (cantatas 4 – 6). Above all it’s Finley who sings overwhelmingly, you won’t hear these numbers better on record.

Much in Harnoncourt’s new recording may be unsettling. But it forces you to listen and to take a stand – basically the best that can happen to an interpretation. Its combination of text interpretation without staginess, cantable phrasing without tension and sound-rhetoric without mannerism is unique. So the CD is strongly recommended: As a critical basis to the concert goer and to performers to experience what they have lost during the last years.

Nicholas Anderson, BBC Music Magazine, April 2009

Performance rating: Four stars

Sound rating: Five stars

It’s almost 35 years since Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Vienna Concentus Musicus made their first and until now their only recording of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Then, he entrusted all the soprano solos to an accomplished member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir. In the new, live recording, though, Harnoncourt has reverted to modern tradition by engaging a female soprano and substituting a contralto for the countertenor of the earlier one. In the absence of any documentation I am unable to speak authoritatively on the forces used for choir and orchestra, but they sound larger than in the earlier recording and nowhere more so than in the opening chorus of the first Cantata where the timpani burst upon the ear like giant thunder claps.

The contrasts between the two performances lie mainly in the greater refinement of the period instrumental playing of the Vienna Concentus Musicus and in the more restrained ‘early music’ mannerisms of the newcomer. Harnoncourt and his fine line-up of soloists bring declamatory emphasis to Bach’s music imbuing the work with a feeling of consequence not always to be found in competing versions. Harnoncourt’s closest rival, perhaps, is Ton Koopman whose recording contains expressive singing, and is less artful than many of his performances. My favourite, though, remains that with the Tölz Boys’ Choir directed by its founder Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden. Here the soprano and alto solos are ravishingly sung by boys, bringing us closer to a sound which would have been familiar to Bach himself. In the prolonged absence of this recording, made in 1973, the same year as Harnoncourt’s earlier version, I can confidently place the new one at the top of the league.