Schuller explores spiritual landscape
Gunther Schuller treated the near-capacity audience at St. John’s Cathedral on Friday to a quick survey of Bach’s church cantatas. What a magnificent musical and spiritual terrain it was to survey. And what a excellent guide Schuller proved to be.
Bach’s 200 surviving church cantatas embrace some of his best-known and least-known works, and Schuller choose two of the most famous – Cantata No. 140, “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme” and Cantata No. 147, “Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben” –along with with two comparative rarities – Cantata No. 18, “Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee von Himmel fallt” and Cantata No. 200, “Bekennen will ich seinen Namen.” What struck me about the four was the sometimes weird imagery that gave the texts their emotion and the beauty and variety of the music Bach lavished on those texts, weird or not.
In none of the four cantatas does Bach repeat instrumentation, or texture or mood. Whether it was in mezzo-soprano Barbara Rearick’s intense reading of the brief aria that is all that remains of Cantata No. 200, or the lengthy and colorful full-ranging forces in Cantata No. 147 – Bach caught the essence of those powerful texts. And Schuller found the way to project that power whether the music was quiet or forceful.
The soloists Schuller choose were ideal partners in Schuller’s enterprise. Each brought fine diction, easy technical command, and a flexible range of moods to Bach’s shifting demands. There was no need to make a choice between the freshness and innocence of soprano Janet Brown or the darker complexity of mezzo Barbara Rearick. Or between the lightness and clarity of tenor Rockland Osgood and the threatening or triumphant bass-baritone of James Maddalena. Bach provided something for all sides of each singer’s arsenal of qualities. Boy soprano Jordan Butler brought a charming purity to the soprano part in the Litany movement of Cantata No. 18, a touch that never occurred to me just looking at the score of this work.
Schuller’s 20-voice Bach Choir could have used a bit more heft since it was placed in back of the similar-sized orchestra. But the size of both groups provided a good clear texture to works that can so easily turn muddy and unwieldy when the number of instrumentalists or singers are increased just to give added horsepower to the sound.
These four cantatas represent only a tiny sample of Bach’s output of church cantatas. Nobody really knows know many more than the 200 survivors these might have been. Three hundred? Four hundred? Impossible to say. But what Schuller, his soloists and the Festival Orchestra and Choir demonstrated Friday was the enormous variety and beauty that exists in each one of them. All four showed why the Northwest Bach Festival remains so festive.