Patron comment on 08.09.2017

Music to combat grief is John Eliot Gardiner's apt description of Bach's Actus Tragicus, coupled on this CD with a timely performance of the Easter Oratorio. Gardiner's long, in-depth experience of Bach's music has been manifest over the past decade through the many SDG recordings emanating from his Bach Pilgrimage in 2000 with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque soloists. This, however, is a completely new recording, made in June last year. The Actus Tragicus is comparatively early Bach, but it is thoroughly mature in the range of penetrating emotions that Gardiner and his forces fully and poignantly explore here. If the chorus is assigned the upbeat role in the first number and in the lively counterpoint of the final one, elsewhere in the Actus Tragicus the arias and ariosos float on the air of consolation. The elegiac mood of the piece is heralded by a remarkable sinfonia at the start, softly scored for recorders, viole da gamba and organ and in its harmonies mixing sorrow with serenity. Gardiner has a judicious sense of the pulse of this music, and his singers and instrumentalists draw their colouring, phrasing and textural inflections from the music's natural contours and expressive implications. A succinct piece, it says all it needs to say in 20 minutes or so, and this performance is a persuasive advocate of it. --Telegraph,23/4/14