August 14: Cantatas (English Baroque Soloists & Monteverdi Choir; John Eliot Gardiner, conductor)
Renowned egomaniac assaults colleague, gets sacked. Now, we listen.
We’re featuring music from another unappealing guy this week — John Eliot Gardiner. (Not a Nazi, at least, but I have more of them in the pipeline.)
Gardiner is one of the great scholars of Baroque music, and he’s been thinking about Bach for his entire life — as a child, the actual Bach painting in the banner of my newsletter hung in his living room. He founded an orchestra and a chorus that has recorded the complete cantata cycle, and he has been a pioneer of performances on period instruments. An important figure!
And by all accounts (including his own), he’s a right prick. He rips into his musicians at rehearsals, makes people around him 'feel like shit’, and he’s been divorced three times. Count ‘em: 🚩🚩🚩. Most recently, he punched a singer in the head after he exited the stage incorrectly. 🚩!!! This finally led to Gardiner’s ouster from the groups he conducted for decades. Good riddance? Who’s to say, besides the guy who got clocked, maybe.
Gardiner’s cantata records are fine — the orchestras are together and there’s a sense of the conductor’s point of view — but they never soar or break your heart like great recordings should. Maybe a lesson from Gardiner’s personal style is that you can bully your way to nailing the notes, but high art requires your orchestra to love you.
I listened to BWV’s 48, 75, 79, 89, 90, 109, 110, 111, 131, 132, 188, 190, 191, 192, and 200 for this post, and my excerpts are pulled from many of Gardiner albums. Here is some representative cover art, all of which feature close-up photos of unwashed Asian or African peasants. I’m really not sure about the art direction in this series.
Highlights:
My standout cantata from this set is BWV 131, a very moody piece. Out of the depths I cry to thee, o Lord. Lord, hear my voice! From the opener:
And a haunting moment of vocal harmony in a later aria:
In BWV 109, a wow moment as the chorus joins in:
BWV 75 is split into two parts, this is from the sinfonia of the second, with a nice brass counterpoint line:
Two excellent endings. To BWV 48, really sticking the landing after plenty of flips and tumbles:
Very gently, in BWV 133:
A surprise pedal tone in the opening of BWV 188:
Masterful orchestration in the second movement of that same cantata — everything in its right place:
Two duets:
One for the low voices in the fifth movement of BWV 190, Jesus will be everything for me:
And in BWV 192, a canon of sorts - big Bach brains:
The whole of BWV 200 is a short aria with outstanding counterpoint. In these moments, you can hear the through line from Bach to Haydn to Mozart:
I recall reading that the weird album art is supposed to show that Bach's cantatas are universal, which I suppose means that even poor villagers in the mountains of some far-off country, as the cover art depicts, can appreciate them Well, not really. Bach's cantatas come from about as specific a time, place, culture, language, and musical tradition as you find in the Western musical canon. Someone from a different culture might respond to a Mozart serenade, but Bach's cantatas won't make much sense.
That excerpt from BWV 109, solo soprano then joined by chorus, reminds me of the next to last movement of the St. Matthew, Nun ist der Herr zur Ruh gebracht, a moving recit in which each of the four solo voices sings a line or two, followed by the chorus, "Mein Jesu gute Nacht" (My Jesus, good night). At this point I usually burst into tears. That's just the recit before the heartbreaking final chorus.