Festival Overview
The image of Leipzig hanging over from the 20th century is of a rather dull industrial town in East Germany, with its best days behind it when it was the second city of Saxony – municipal rather than princely. That’s now rubbish. In early summer it is a town full of thriving pavement cafés in a centre that still has its mediaeval and baroque heart as well as all the normal accoutrements of success. The Bach Festival (9 – 19 June) takes place not only in the four churches where he was in charge of the music but in the baroque rooms he and his sons would have known well, the museums to Schumann and Mendelssohn, and on the streets – long into the night. There’s a tram to Halle, the town where Handel was born, and for a week, if you tire of music, you can hop on it to the grass-court tennis tournament so associated with Roger Federer.
Artistic Director: Prof. Dr. Michael Maul
Saturday 11 June 2022
Tomaskirche, Leipzig
Les Talens Lyriques
Berlin Vocal Consort
Rachel Redmond Soprano
Hagar Sharvit Alto
William Knight Tenor
Kresimir Strazanac Bass
Christophe Rousset Conductor
CPE Bach Introduction to…
JS Bach Symbolum Nicenum (Nicene Credo) from Mass in B Minor
Handel I know that my redeemer liveth and Hallelujah Chorus from The Messiah
CPE Bach
Symphony in D Major, Wq 183/1
Magnificat, Wq 215
Heilig, Wq 217
The Review
When CPE Bach programmed a charity concert in Hamburg on 9 April 1786 he unwittingly proved to us two centuries later that he was as good an artistic director as he was a composer.
Most modern concert planners asked to make the same selection would have turned it around, put all the CPE material in the first half, opened the second with the aria from The Messiah, then made the meat the JS Bach section and finished with the Hallelujah chorus. But CPE was right. We were made to concentrate properly by his selection from the B minor mass, relieved by the sheer exuberance of Handel and then reminded that CPE Bach was not in a very different league.
Listening to both Bachs in Leipzig’s Tomaskirche is an extraordinarily moving experience (despite the excruciatingly uncomfortable pews – take a cushion). Hearing part of the B minor Mass so immaculately performed takes it to a whole new level. Rachel Redmond’s radiant soprano sound is perfect for this music and that acoustic, not so operatic that it unbalances the ensemble but matching the sumptuous accompaniment of Les Talens Lyriques’ generous continuo section. And Kresimir Strazanac has full bodied but open bass tone that allows the words to hit their mark.
In 1749 JS was too busy, it seems, to write yet another Magnificat – after all, how he could hardly have bettered his first from 1723, when he began his work in this church – and handed the job to CPE. He was right to trust him with it and the son rose to the occasion with plenty of backward glances at his father’s style but an imprint of his own – that transition moment in musical history between the baroque and classical – which was richer in texture and less formal than perhaps the city’s worthies were used to.
Michael Maur, the festival’s Artistic Director who unearthed the programme, was inspired in offering it to Christophe Rousset, who has not only an unerring sense of tempo and balance but, in Les Talens Lyriques, a string section (led by Gilone Gaubert) that was immaculately together and a wind group, notably the trumpet and oboes, that gleefully transcended the technical problems posed by early instruments. This was one of those concerts make festivals such inspiring occasions. Not all the festival concerts lived up to this standard but frankly, when there are high points like this, who cares!
SM