Bach – Mass in B Minor, played by the Feinstein Ensemble with the London Bach Singers: Martin Feinstein , conductor
Bach’s B Minor Mass is a piece I have never heard in the concert hall before now….. except, that is, on an occasion when I sung in it (almost 50 years ago). I was recruited by a friend to join a large College choral society at Cambridge (St Johns) who sung a major work in the choral repertory in their Chapel once every term. I remember my introduction to singing with them (I don’t read music and I have a very nondescript voice) was growling away in the Brahms Requiem, a piece I knew fairly well, in the Autumn term, and then came the Bach in the Spring term., which was a piece I didn’t know at all (at the time I knew little about Bach’s works). The chorus was – given the Cambridge of the time – heavily weighted towards men; there must have been something like 150 basses, 30 tenors, 20 sopranos and the same number of contraltos. I followed 149 basses in roaring out the part when I knew what I was doing and mouthing it in the runs and more complex singing. Goodness knows who the conductor was – quite possibly now he’s a senior luminary of the conducting world, but he must have had his work cut out to control us basses. My abiding memory though is of the day the orchestra came to rehearse with us for the first time, and I was suddenly transfixed by the glory of the swirling trumpets and the drums in the Gloria, Sanctus and Dona Nobis Pacem.
So the B Minor Mass has always been a favourite since then, but the recordings I have owned over the years have tended to be old-fashioned – Richter and Klemperer. The Feinstein performance was a very different beast. There were 21 period instrumentalists and just 10 singers, who doubled as the chorus and soloists. 10 singers were quite possibly what Bach might had had at his disposal at St Thomas’ Leipzig, but that’s not really so relevant, given that there is no certainty it was ever performed in Leipzig (though – something I didn’t know – the programme notes said that the Kyrie and Gloria could be sung in the Lutheran Church for certain thanksgiving services) and, given that he may have conceived it as a monument to his art, Bach might have envisaged much larger forces. The size didn’t really matter that much, though, given the excellence and power of the singers and the relatively small size of the venue. The star singer for me was Matthew Brook in Et in Spiritum Sanctum (I realised I’d heard him in Errolyn Wallen’s Dido’s Ghost as Aeneas in July) but all were good. The main issue I had with the performance – a usual one with me – is the tendency of period instrument conductors to go as fast as possible wherever they get the chance. Here the Sanctus in particular raced along, and lost some dignity thereby – the Quoniam too was rushed, making life even more difficult for the woman playing (very well) the fiendish natural horn part. The Et Resurrexit went at an undignified gallop. But I wouldn’t want to make too much of this….there was a lot of beautiful woodwind playing, particularly from the flutes, and some of the tempi – the Gratias Agimus and final Dona Nobis Pacem – were just right, to my ears. So, not a perfect performance perhaps, but great to be able to hear this great work live after all these years…….
John's musical journey 