Tudor Church Music Vol.1 - The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips

Tudor Church Music - Volume 1
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
Gimell CDGIM 209

English sacred music of the sixteenth century has formed the backbone of everything The Tallis Scholars have done, right from the beginning. The original reason why we chose to have ten core singers in the group was because the English composers of this period had developed a choir with five basic voice-ranges, instead of the more normal four, and I had decided that the dazzling sonorities inherent in their writing benefited from having two singers on each part. This dazzle is emphasized if the music is sung at a high pitch, which led us increasingly to perform with four sopranos - two high and two lower - above two countertenors, two tenors and two basses. Thus was born the classic Tallis Scholars line-up, which later could be adapted to sing much mainland European renaissance music as well. Such a line-up sounds almost inevitable now, but it wasn't in 1973.

This volume contain some of the most substantial music written anywhere in Europe in the early years of the renaissance; and it shows just how different English music was from what the Franco-Flemish composers had developed on the Continent. Instead of an inward-looking, contemplative mood, there is extrovert, brilliant writing. Instead of melodic lines which tend to move by step, chant-like, there are leaps and jumps so virtuosic that they rival the coloratura writing of solo vocal music from centuries later. Where Josquin has a reliably developing harmonic background, Browne sets down massive chords which change slowly, allowing the upper voices to festoon them with ornaments. Looked at historically the English composers of this period can almost be classified as ‘late medieval' for their archaic compositional practices and quirky scorings, yet the sound world they created is one of the most identifiable and compelling of all time. Once the listener is hooked on these sonorities nothing else ever seems quite so good. The second volume of The Tallis Scholars sing Tudor Church Music (CDGIM 210) shows how this characteristically English sound developed in the high renaissance, a picture which is amplified and brought to a conclusion in The Tallis Scholars sing Thomas Tallis (CDGIM 203) and The Tallis Scholars sing William Byrd (CDGIM 208).

There is no better place to start in illustrating pure sonority than with the music of John Browne (d.1505). The sheer length of these five antiphons shows that something unusual is happening; and then one notices the scorings, each different from the last. It seems that once Browne felt he had squeezed every last nuance from a sonority, it was time to try a new one. The largest in every sense is the eight-voice O Maria salvatoris (TrMAATTBB). This is backed up by three six-voice compositions, all for different groupings: Stabat iuxta (TTTTBB), O regina mundi clara (ATTTBarB), and the Stabat mater (TrMAATB). The most ‘normal' is the five-voice Salve regina (TrMATB). All the pieces come from the Eton Choirbook, in which Browne was given pre-eminence: O Maria salvatoris, the only eight-voice composition in the volume, opens it.

The Salve regina and the Stabat mater are the pieces which for years have maintained Browne's reputation as a composer. They are both highly expressive, though for many commentators the Stabat mater is the supreme masterpiece of the period, contrasting dramatic writing with contemplative passages in an emotional world of contrasts thought to have surfaced first with Monteverdi. This drama famously breaks through the surface at the word ‘Crucifige', which Browne hammers into place before turning inwards again with the phrases which follow: ‘O quam gravis illa poena' (‘O how bitter was your anguish'). For me, however, the piece which sums Browne up most perfectly is the Stabat iuxta. Its scoring (TTTTBB) has probably militated against frequent performances, but it is just that scoring which makes such an impact. With six voices operating within a compass of less than two octaves the opportunities for dense, almost cluster chords are unrivalled. The use of low thirds in chordal spacing is not encouraged by text-books of correct polyphonic procedure, but Browne simply couldn't avoid them with this scoring, and they are thrilling. Density of sonority leads to other delights, like false relations and other dissonances, which characterize much of the piece and culminate in the final bars.

William Cornysh's four-voice Gaude virgo mater Christi (AATB), also in the Eton Choirbook, is a brief example of the genius of a very different composer, a kind of alter ego to John Browne. Where Browne was inward and at times mystical in mood, Cornysh (d.1523) was typically extrovert and clear-textured. In Gaude virgo he sends his four low voices rushing around with characteristic verve, towards the end employing strict imitation between them at the resonant words ‘Mortis in periculo'. Later in this volume there are two more pieces by Cornysh: the ineffable Salve regina, one of his grandest and at times most theatrical conceptions, and the more modest and purely beautiful Ave Maria, mater Dei, a concert favourite of ours. The miracle of the Salve regina is how Cornysh never lets the momentum sag over such a broad canvas, constantly alternating powerful trios between the lower voices with more luminous sections involving the higher ones. All this culminates in a rhapsodic passage in praise of the Virgin, building unforgettably to the final word ‘Salve'. Never was Cornysh's dramatic sense more tellingly on display.

The remainder of the music in this volume is made up of two of the three Western Wind Masses - those by John Taverner (c1490-18 October 1545) and Christopher Tye (c1505-before 15 March 1573). The third one - by Sheppard - is included on The Tallis Scholars sing Tudor Church Music - Volume Two (CDGIM 210). Together these three Western Wind Masses make a unique set. Not only was there no other example in English renaissance music of a linked series of Mass compositions by different composers, there was also no precedent in English composition for a Mass based on a secular tune. If Taverner's was the first of this set to be written, it was breaking important new ground, probably deliberately emulating the justly famed continental Mass-settings on such popular songs as L'homme armé and Mille regretz. Tye and Sheppard then took up the challenge of turning Taverner's initiative into a Continental-style series. From the listener's point of view the linking is both obvious and satisfying since the three settings use the same unusual four-part scoring of treble, mean, tenor and bass; and the Western Wind melody, beautifully tuneful in itself, is almost always audible within the polyphony.

It is always assumed that Taverner's setting was the earliest, and that the other two were written to complement it. Certainly it is the most inventive, using the melody thirty-six times in all and treating it as the scaffolding for a set of variations. These variations were written without any free passages in between the quotations of the melody, nine variations in each of the four movements. Twenty-one of the statements are in the top part (where they are at their most audible), ten in the tenor and five in the bass. The melody is never used as a traditional cantus firmus. The end result is that the Taverner version is the most varied and the most sectional of the three, the beginning of a quotation almost always bringing with it a new scoring and new figuration. It is for this reason that tribute is paid to Taverner's resourcefulness in inventing these figurations and their counterpoints - he came up with well over thirty of them, each one adding something to one's appreciation of the melody itself.

The one thing Taverner did not do was put the melody in the second voice down - the mean. It was surely to fill out the scheme, and to pay a kind of homage, that Tye put the melody in the mean only. Keeping it in one part made it easier for him to elide the quotations, as happens at the very beginning where three statements run into each other. This in turn means that Tye's setting is more homogeneous than Taverner's, though also more virtuosic, for example at ‘Benedictus'. In this, and in some truly bizarre harmonies elsewhere, one has the sense that Tye, like his contemporaries White and Sheppard, was searching for new expressive options. They did not look to Europe to find them.

Peter Phillips 2008

Flemish Masters - The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips

The Tallis Scholars sing Flemish Masters
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
Gimell CDGIM 211

Just as the Flemish school of composers was central to every aspect of Renaissance music, so these composers have been central to the work of The Tallis Scholars. At regular intervals we have dedicated whole albums - as well as whole concerts - to their compositions, and particularly to their Mass-settings. Here one finds the essence of their art, the showcase in which they displayed their most sophisticated techniques.

This selection contains five of the greatest examples of Flemish Mass-composition. They were written in the hundred years between about 1475 (the Ockeghem) and 1575 (the Lassus), in which time the scope of such music had expanded enormously. The time-line is instructive. The earliest - the Ockeghem - is for four voices. Next came the Isaac, for six voices, followed by the Rore, for seven, and the Brumel, for twelve. The sequence is rounded off by the Lassus for eight voices, disposed in the late-Renaissance manner of double choir. Interestingly the greatest of all the Flemish writers - Josquin des Prez (whose Masses we have recorded elsewhere, intending eventually to record them all) - kept to four voices in all his Mass-settings. For him the Mass was a vehicle for the most subtle chamber music; for the composers represented here it was more an opportunity for grandeur, which meant increasingly polychoral sonorities.

Other techniques link these settings, proving that they were the products of a school of training which passed its techniques from one generation to the next. For example they are all based on pre-existing material: three on polyphonic models (all of Flemish provenance) and two on chant. This means that each composer had to find a way of quoting his model while surrounding it with his own inventions. Typically for Flemish writers these inventions tended to be motivic and imitative, the melodic lines pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle of interlocking fragments. This could lead to extreme contrapuntal ingenuity - much beloved of the Flemish more generally - in such devices as canon. Only by the time of Lassus did these national techniques begin to become genuinely international and proto-Baroque, harmony taking over from the more linear thought of the earlier writers.

The Missa De Apostolis of Heinrich Isaac (c.1450-1517) is unusual in being an alternatim setting. This means that by constantly alternating between chant and polyphony many of the polyphonic sections are contained within a single phrase. Isaac met the challenge of brevity by intensifying his part-writing and using sonority to spectacular effect: a six-voice texture was a rarity around 1500, and only the English at that period could dream up quite such thickly dissonant cadential formulas. This Mass was based on a selection of Gregorian chants taken from the repertoire of the Feast of the Apostles, and must have been written for court use in Vienna, where Isaac was employed and where it was customary not to include the Credo as part of the Ordinary.

By contrast the Missa Au travail suis by Johannes Ockeghem (c.1425-1497) was based on a secular model - a chanson either by Ockeghem himself or the unknown ‘Barbingant'. In fact Ockeghem only quoted the tenor from this three-part model (at that time the tenor was often held to be the ‘tune'), doing so infrequently but obviously: the first ten notes of it may be clearly heard at the beginning of each movement as a head-motif. After that references are hard to identify and the music settles into a pattern of gentle, undemonstrative chamber-music, the second Agnus Dei summing up the stillness of Ockeghem's conception. The reason why this music sounds earlier than anything else on these discs is that it lacks High Renaissance sonority. As was customary in the fifteenth century, Ockeghem kept his four voices within a narrow compass (except in the extreme case of the second Agnus) and regularly scored down to duets and trios.

From the other end of the historical spectrum comes the Missa Osculetur me of Orlandus Lassus (1532-1594). Here everything is sonority: brilliant sounds created by using eight voices in the ‘Venetian' double-choir arrangement, replete with high soprano parts and wide overall tessituras. In this, as in much else, he had effectively ceased to be a Flemish composer, his long years in Italy having taught him a more avant-garde style.

In fact Lassus's three double-choir Masses - the other two are the Missa Vinum bonum and the Missa Bell' Amfitrit' altera - represented an important step in the general advance towards Baroque music. Andrea Gabrieli visited Lassus in Munich in the 1560s after Lassus himself had made repeated visits to Venice. Clearly he was influential in the development of the new idiom, and there is a certain irony in the fact that it was a Flemish composer, whose training was in techniques antipathetic to everything Baroque, who led the way. Nonetheless one admires how he instinctively avoided the tedium which later would beset so much polychoral writing and its too-obvious effects. Here his alternating phrases are quite long, so that simple imitation between the parts is possible; and he was careful to make a strong difference in sonority between passages for one choir and those for both choirs together. The result is an early, but genuinely virtuosic, exercise in an idiom which would last for at least another two hundred years.

The Missa Praeter rerum seriem by Cipriano de Rore (c.1515-1565) was probably written only a decade or two before the Lassus - Rore was an older contemporary of Lassus but died considerably younger; and if the exact date of the Lassus is not known, the Rore must come from the period (1547-58) when he was employed by Duke Ercole II d'Este of Ferrara, whose name he invokes throughout the composition. Yet despite this temporal proximity to Lassus, and the fact that Rore spent an unhappy year (1563) as maestro di cappella at St Mark's in Venice, this Mass is a trenchant example of Flemish writing. It is based on one of Josquin's greatest motets, already in six voices, to which Rore had the skill to add an extra soprano part. He then turned the first alto part into a long-note cantus firmus, perpetually quoting the words ‘Hercules secundus dux Ferrarie quartus vivit et vivet' to the devotional song melody used by Josquin. Much of the power of this wonderful music derives from the Josquin motet, but close inspection shows how resourceful Rore was in his use of it. New counterpoints abound, and the extra soprano part adds a brilliance to the sound which is patently of the High Renaissance.

Much of what I have talked about here is summed up in the astonishing Missa Et ecce terrae motus by Antoine Brumel (c.1460-c.1520). Clearly this is a composition of an earlier period than the Rore and Lassus, yet it is the most sonorous of all. Since twelve-part writing was extremely rare in the period before 1520 Brumel was effectively making up the idiom as he went along. That he was successful is shown by how famous both he and this music became in the sixteenth century: the only surviving source was copied in Munich under the direct supervision of Lassus, who himself sang tenor II in an early performance; and only Josquin received more laments from his fellow composers on his death.

This idiom is quintessentially Flemish, blown up to vast proportions. Many of the twelve-voice sections are underpinned by a canon, quoted in long notes between the first bass and the first two tenor parts, using the first seven notes of the Easter plainsong antiphon at Lauds, Et ecce terrae motus. The purpose of this scaffolding was to give Brumel huge harmonic pillars, which move slowly. At first hearing this measured harmonic turn-over may seem disappointing, but soon the logic of it becomes apparent: Brumel needed to move slowly in order to work out all the motifs he has invented. In doing so he effectively abandoned polyphony in the sense of independent yet interrelated melodic lines, and resorted to sequences and figurations of the kind Josquin was exploring with no more than four voices.

Yet despite its fame, Brumel's masterpiece remained an isolated achievement, an unforgettable one-off. It is a tribute to his genius, and the vibrancy of the Flemish cultural scene, that such a glorious experiment could ever have been commissioned, written and performed.

Peter Phillips 2009

Renaissance Giants - The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips

Renaissance Giants
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
Gimell CDGIM 207

The High Renaissance is well known for its cultural giants. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and above all Michelangelo epitomize a period when the human spirit seemed to grow and gain in confidence. There is no more visible proof of this than Michelangelo's seventeen-foot-tall statue of David, more than twice the height of any major piece of sculpture before it. And Italy was not the only country which suddenly seemed to be populated by more-than-life-size men of genius, Shakespeare and Cervantes among them. This collection is designed to illustrate the musical side of this astonishing period in European history, from England via Flanders and Spain to Rome.

Music and musicians can bestride their world in one of two ways. They can either write a masterpiece which is in itself colossal; or they can write so many great works that they slowly change the countryside around them. Thomas Tallis did both. By writing music of the highest quality in every style of the period for nearly sixty years he influenced everybody who followed him. And he also wrote Spem in alium, perhaps not his most influential composition - who could follow it? - but unquestionably the largest single work of the period. Conceived for forty independent voice-parts arranged in eight five-part choirs, Spem in alium, like Michelangelo's David, seems to break through what lesser men had come to accept as normal in music and enter a new world. The effect of forty parts coming together in properly argued polyphony is quite staggering. How did Tallis do it, without modern aids like computers or even sufficiently large pieces of manuscript paper on which to line up all the voices? There is much about Spem in alium which is not known - like why he thought of such a thing in the first place - but the greatest imponderable is how any mind could invent so much detail. Nothing comes close to rivalling it.

The Western Wind Mass by John Taverner is big in a quite different way from Spem in alium. Throughout the Renaissance period there was a vogue for taking popular tunes of the day and dressing them up, a technique which jazz musicians were to emulate in later times. Taverner chose the beautiful melody known as ‘Westron Wynde', a love song which encourages the wind and the rain to do their worst so long as the singer and his beloved can be together. In choosing such a profane model for a Mass-setting Taverner was not in fact doing anything very uncommon; what was unusual was quoting the tune thirty-six times. I do not know any set of variations before Purcell's ‘grounds' to go so far; and, like Purcell, Taverner has the imagination to make them all interesting. He is quite deliberate about it: nine statements in each of the four movements, each one taking on new ideas and counter-themes. No one can miss the tune itself, since it is quoted twenty-one times in the top part, where it is always perfectly audible. It also comes ten times in the tenor part and five in the bass, though it is never sung by the altos. Taverner also helps the listener by making each variation self-contained and running them straight into each other without extra material. This makes the music quite sectional, alternating solo and full passages, but with the melody always present. Taverner was sufficiently a giant of his time to start a brief tradition of Western Wind settings: there are examples by his younger contemporaries Christopher Tye and John Sheppard.

If ever there was a giant among Renaissance composers, it was Josquin. It has become something of a modern cliché to compare his standing with that of Beethoven: a composer who could take any form of music and transform it. Part of his great influence came from the fact that he travelled throughout Europe, the first super-star among composers, a fact which was acknowledged at the time not least because he expected to be paid more than anyone else. He was especially present in Rome, from where he undoubtedly shaped the course of Italian polyphony in general, and Palestrina's style in particular. Josquin's Missa Pange lingua is perhaps his best-known work and possibly his last Mass-setting. In general outline it is not dissimilar from Taverner's Western Wind Mass: a set of variations on a well-known tune, but in this case the tune is a chant melody from the liturgy for the feast of Corpus Christi; and Josquin almost never quotes it straight. Indeed it is so hidden in the polyphonic texture that one may think of the whole composition as a fantasy on a plainsong, rather than a set of variations. The clearest statement is at the beginning of the third Agnus Dei, where the melody finally emerges in recognizable form in the soprano part.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was by far and away the most celebrated Italian composer of the High Renaissance and, like Josquin, a legend in his lifetime. He was also, unlike any other Renaissance composer of any nationality, celebrated from his own time to ours without interruption. I wonder if any other composer in the history of music, apart from Wagner, has had so much written about him. And apart from all this he was working in and around the Vatican at the same time as Michelangelo in his later years, whom he must have known. As a result there is no other composer who is so closely identified with the culture of the Italian Renaissance period. His Missa Brevis was probably written for the Sistine Chapel choir to sing, which would mean that its first performances would have taken place surrounded by Michelangelo's newly painted frescoes. Why the piece is called ‘Brevis' is something of a mystery, since the music is not especially short and all the usual movements are present. It may be because it is scored for only four voices, though this was quite commonplace. The final, glorious Agnus Dei increases the number of voices to five by introducing a second soprano part, in canon with the first. Unlike his teacher Tallis, William Byrd didn't write any single gigantic work by which he may be remembered. Indeed he is best remembered for his many small-scale pieces which, despite their size, revolutionized English composition. Like several of the other giants in this collection, Byrd turned his hand to every form of music available to him, transforming them as he went: music for keyboard, lute, viol consort, voices with viol consort, sacred vocal writing for both the Catholic and Protestant churches, and madrigals. To compare him with Shakespeare has some force since their lives overlapped, they both worked in London at the same time, and they both had the same characteristic intelligence of mind which penetrated to the heart of the words they were involved with. Byrd's Mass for four voices is one of the three Masses he wrote in the 1590s and published, without title pages, in defiance of the Protestant ban on Catholic artefacts. This is not gigantic music in any sense, but subtle, intimate writing which in recent times has achieved greater renown than many much weightier musical edifices of the period.

The Spanish sixteenth century had its own great men and women to celebrate, from St Ignatius Loyola and St Teresa of Avila, to El Greco, Morales and Victoria. It will be seen from these names that the accent there in the High Renaissance was on the Catholic Church and spiritual life. Tomás Luis de Victoria was no exception to this. After being ordained priest in Rome in 1575 he spent the years from 1587 until his death employed at the court in Madrid, initially acting as chaplain to the Dowager Empress Maria, for whose funeral he wrote this Requiem in 1603. It comes as no surprise to discover that Victoria only wrote sacred music, and not very much of it by some standards, but what he did write is of such intensity that for many people his larger works, and especially the six-voice Requiem, are without rival amongst High Renaissance masterpieces. The slow, inevitable unfolding of this music, movement by movement, in complete serenity surely has a message for all time.

Peter Phillips 2006

Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 - Georg Tintner

Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 7

Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Georg Tintner

Naxos 8.554269

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Classics Today Rating: 10/10

Georg Tintner's generally excellent survey of the complete Bruckner symphonies for Naxos reaches a peak with this exceptional performance of the Seventh. What makes Tintner such a wonderful Bruckner conductor is his unerring ability to set a naturally flowing tempo for each of Bruckner's thematic complexes. The result, in the first movement, is richly contrasted, but never eccentric or disruptive of Bruckner's musical architecture. Tintner's flexibility gives the opening a genuinely powerful sense of momentum that makes the following slow movement sound all the more inevitable. Too often, this symphony sounds like two slow movements followed by two quick ones, despite the "Allegro moderato" marking on the very first page. Tintner also disciplines the RSNO's brilliant brass section so that they produce a glowing sonority that never sounds forced or harsh. Add to these several pluses a splendidly rich recording, and the result is as fine a Seventh as you're likely to hear - and a steal at budget price.

David Hurwitz

Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 8 & 0 - Georg Tintner

Anton Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 8 & 0
National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, Georg Tintner
Naxos 8.554215-16

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I didn't find any review "with a pedigree", but found many of the reviews at the amazon page linked, both informed and competently written.

Mahler: Symphony No.6 - Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Haitink

Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 6
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink
CSO Resound CSOR901807

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FANFARE

Appropriately enough, this recording arrived on July 7, Mahler’s birthday. My most recent encounter with Bernard Haitink’s Mahler Sixth wasn’t a particularly positive experience (26:4); this was a live recording from France in 2001 (issued in 2002), and though I found much to admire, the performance lacked the kind of urgency heard in the then recent performances conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and Benjamin Zander; more damaging in this listener’s estimation was Haitink’s uncharacteristic omission of the exposition repeat in the first movement. Every Mahlerite should be thankful to the CSO, therefore, for its decision to preserve Haitink’s most recent Mahler performances, first with the Third (31:2), and now with this outstanding Sixth.

Haitink’s opening tempo in the Allegro is measured, very similar to Zander and Rattle. Both the >ma non troppo and aber markig notations are the clue here: while a faster tempo is certainly appropriate to the energico indication, a case can be made for a more moderate and precise march (“sturdy” is Michael Steinberg’s translation of markig and that is appropriate here); think of it more as determinedly implacable, rather than brutally insistent. It should come as no surprise that the orchestra is superb, with excellent detail (thanks in part, no doubt, to the sound production). The “Alma” second theme is a ray of sunshine illuminating dark places, expressive of happiness rather than impetuosity - the difference isn’t so much one of tempo as of content.

The development section is expansive and very atmospheric, injecting a much darker sense of futility; the “music from far away” is therefore that much more effective, achieving a sense of time in suspension. The cowbells are evocative without being obtrusive, and the strings are ethereal in their sensitive interplay with the celesta; the exposed solos for horn and clarinet add more contrast to the airy strings. The return to the march theme returns us to the hurly-burly of daily life, not at a frenetic pace, but simply as more of the same. The same kind of darkness heard in the development infuses the recapitulation; the coda swaggers to its triumphant conclusion as a firm refutation to the negativity of the march.

Haitink’s first movement, at just shy of 25 minutes in duration, is slower than the timings noted at Mahler’s own performances, which lasted between 22 and 23 minutes. Gergiev’s is a frenzied and heavy march, just shy of 22 minutes. I maintain, though, that Haitink’s is the more effective performance, the extra time supplying the kind of contrast that heightens Mahler’s thematic layout; Gergiev’s performance is without nuance and becomes monolithic.

The Scherzo is next, and with performances as good as this one, the logic of the original order of the middle movements becomes practically irrefutable (for a thoughtful examination of the middle-movement sequence debacle, see La Grange’s comprehensive analysis in Volume 4 of his Mahler). This parody of the first movement is heavier in its emphasis but otherwise continues the sense of implacability. Mahler’s most rigorously composed symphony is given rigorous control, and Mahler’s brilliant orchestration is exposed by the sound production - it is detailed and has depth both in an acoustic sense and in low-end reproduction. Haitink employs modern seating for the strings, but there is little loss of clarity. One notable demonstration of this clarity is the dance-like transition after the Trio, with its dry-bones xylophone. There is a truely pathetic quality to the Trios: they may evoke childlike images, but they seem too fragile for this environment, so that the resumption of the main theme is that much more sinister - Haitink really underlines the heaviness with groaning, heaving cellos, basses, and tuba.

As Steinberg says, the Andante is indeed “balm” after the Scherzo’s “music of disintegration and suppressed violence.” Haitink’s performance fits that characterization: initially calm but (Mahler being Mahler) with strong undertones that eventually erupt into powerful (but not violent) emotion, eventually to reach the heights, accompanied by the cowbells. There is more exquisite playing from the orchestra, the very poignant oboe of Eugene Izotov being the standout.

Haitink’s finale is painted on a very broad canvas: at 34:00, his is a couple of minutes longer than Tilson Thomas and Zander (and Mahler). How that time is utilized is the key. The exposition is dark, almost primordial, with life crawling, scrabbling for any handhold. The striving in the music for some semblance of triumph is battered down by very convincing climaxes: these make the hammer blows less of an idiosyncratic effect and more like exclamation marks - Haitink’s treatment of dynamics is another strength of this performance. In the expansive development, the gloom gives way to reminiscence: pointillistic effects of celesta and harp are so clear; there is plenty of vitality in the upwardly striving music, and then the first hammer blow falls. The sound is deep and dull, almost felt rather than heard (Zander’s is a much more singular sound).

Haitink’s pacing is very effective and there is ample dramatic tension in the warring themes at the heart of the development. The second hammer blow is less conspicuous, in keeping with Mahler’s wish that each successive blow is diminished in sound, though this one is integrated into the percussion battery almost too effectively. The decaying themes in the recapitulation are marked by a very heavy harp and mournful brass, like birds of prey on a corpse. The reminiscent music (“from far away”) is incredibly poignant here, the cowbells barely audible. One last attempt at life: the section, all brass chorales and desperation is almost frenzied in this performance, with the leering march as counterpoint, until all striving ceases with the coda. There is no third hammer blow, but Mahler’s revision is realized through the thunderous timpani. The “epitaph” for brass is practically motionless, hovering near death’s door, until the final, decisive stroke, more deadly than any hammer.

Coming so soon after Gergiev’s disappointing recording (31:6), this Haitink performance makes for a salutary corrective. Where Gergiev is all momentum and pulse, Haitink applies the lessons of a lifetime devoted to conducting Mahler and produces a performance of depth, nuance, and insight. Though Haitink’s expansive conception rivals that of the Third in duration, there is never a sense of time weighing heavily - all is drama and contrast. For those (like me) who often think of Haitink as the “restrained, sober” Mahlerian, this Sixth should be instructive.

The sound on this release is all one could ask for: spacious but offering exemplary inner-voice detail; ample low-end reproduction but not of the boomy or boxy variety. Mahler’s extraordinary orchestration, particularly that of the finale, where various instrumental sonorities - tremolando strings, celesta, tuba - play against each other, is given every shade of color and individuality.

The Sixth has had an outstanding track record on SACD, beginning with the recording by Tilson Thomas and now including Zander on Telarc, Eschenbach in Philadelphia on Ondine, Fischer on Channel Classics, and Jansons on Amsterdam’s RCO Live label (I haven’t heard the SACD of Abbado’s excellent recording with the BPO on DG). If price is a concern, Fischer’s and Gergiev’s are single-disc recordings, though neither is a bargain; Zander’s is an outstanding deal at three-discs-for-the-price-of-one (I can’t recommend the Gergiev at any rate). I would hope, however, that considerations of price alone won’t deter anyone from obtaining this outstanding performance of one of Mahler’s most dramatic and complex symphonies.

FANFARE: Christopher Abbot

JS Bach: Cantatas BWV 140, 147 - The Monteverdi Choir, Gardiner

Johann Sebastian Bach
Cantatas BWV 140, 147
Holton, Chance, Johnson, Varcoe, The Monteverdi Choir,
The English Baroque Soloists, John Eliot Gardiner
Archiv 431 809-2

This is the third disc in John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Cantata series for Archiv. The works he has chosen contain what are probably the two bestknown pieces in the entire canon, the chorales "Zion hOrt die Wachter singen" ("Zion hears the watchmen sing") from No. 140, and "Jesu bleibet meine Freude", popularly called "Jesu, joy of man's desiring" from No. 147. These masterly cantatas date from different periods in Bach's life. No. 147, in its earliest form, belongs to Bach's Weimar period; but for a Leipzig performance in 1723 he added recitatives, the famous chorale which concludes the first and second parts of the work, and perhaps the bass aria, too. No. 140 is a purely Leipzig piece dating from 1731 when it was sung on the rarely occurring Twenty Seventh Sunday after Trinity.

I have had mixed reactions to Gardiner's previous two cantata discs in this interesting series and I feel somewhat ambivalent about this one, too. Readers will not need to be enlightened concerning performance standards for these are, as usual, commendably high. There is no shortage, either, of affecting gestures in Gardiner's direction which is both warmly communicative and plentifully endowed with insight to the music. No, my problem here lies more with the strength of the interpretations which strike me as lightweight. The opening chorus of No. 140, for example, is a very dramatic affair yet this aspect of Bach's art takes second place to refinement of articulation and gracefulness of phrase. I would not for a moment be without these sterling qualities but the imagery of this great movement is vivid and declamatory and Bach's intention was surely to arouse the passions of his audience. The opening chorus of No. 147 is another radiant piece, this one dominated by a glittering high trumpet. The soloist, Crispian SteelePerkins, plays it almost impeccably yet, once again, I felt the effect was decorative rather than assertive.

The solo singing is by and large excellent. I very much enjoyed the unpretentious vocal quality of Ruth Holton though would like to have felt she had a little bit more in reserve. Michael Chance and Stephen Varcoe are both on characteristically strong form but my greatest pleasure derived from the eloquent declamation of recitatives by Anthony Rolfe Johnson. Choir and instrumentalists are as responsive to Gardiner's direction as we have come to expect of them but even so I am left with the feeling that the great sense of occasion generated by this music has only been realized in part. The Archiv documentation is up to its usual high standard.

N.A., Gramophone Magazine 1992