Customer Reviews

Bach: Mass in B minor

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This is my favorite recording of the Mass in B Minor. Working on a small scale (one singer per part, as opposed to the more usual larger chorus), Parrott creates a performance that is warm, intimate, and joyous. Kirkby's and Van Evera's sopranos blend beautifully. The alto parts are taken by a boy whose voice is passionate and not all that smooth, which only adds to the overall "human" feeling of the performance. There's a lot of disagreement about whether Bach should be performed "big" or "small." (This is probably very much a matter of personal taste. Parrott's small-scale version of the St. John Passion, for instance, seems thin to me -- I like Suzuki's bigger recording with the Bach Collegium Japan.) But with the B-minor Mass, in this particular version, small works. The richness of the music is still there, but with the grandeur and remoteness of the larger chorus pared away, you're somehow aware that real people (albeit gorgeous-voiced ones) are singing it. Other recordings make me admire the Mass; this is the one that makes me love it.

No performance of Bach's B minor Mass could ever be totally dull, but the recording by Harry Christophers and the Sixteen, which is included in the Brilliant Classics Complete Bach Box, comes close. I listened to part of it last night, and decided to search through other versions in my collection to find the best! A foolish idea, of course, but I dug up the original release on vinyl of Parrott's offering, with the divine Emma Kirkby singing soprano. The "shtick" for that performance was the decision to sing everything, choruses included, one on a part. There were outcries of delight and despair at the time. Hearing it again, after some years, I'd say it sounds amazingly vibrant and musical, with the soprano-alto duets surpassing those of any subsequent performance. I like it so well that I'd buying this re-released CD version immediately.

The "best" is elusive. John Eliot Gardiner's recording of 1990 has by far the most thrilling instrumental passages, and the most emotive overall interpretation. Philippe Herreweghe's more orotund choral sound and instrumental stateliness is wonderful, also. Those are the only three choices worth considering: Parrott, Gardiner, and Herreweghe. A real Bachophile will need to have all three.

Whoa! Same day, afterthought. I forgot the excellent and quite distinct performance conducted by Ton Koopman, who takes the slow and mournful movements more poignantly than anyone else. If a crucified and resurrected B minor is what you crave, then Koopman is your best choice.

Oy! Next day: I've been justly chided for haste in declaring only three recordings worthy of interest. Aside from those three, there are also fine performances by Koopman (noted above), Suzuki, and Leonhardt. I'm also assured that the Van Veldhoven performance is excellent, but I haven't heard it. In short, an embarrassment fo riches.

Added in 2010: I don't want to delete my innocent thoughts of a few years ago, but as of NOW, the choice is a good deal simpler. The B minor Mass performance by the Dunedin Consort is head and shoulders above any other. See my review of it for my reasons.

Parrott and Rifkin's approaches, based on the theory of 'one singer per part', cultivate a different kind of taste in Baroque music. People who are used to large choirs might find their versions significantly lacking in grandeur and power at the first listening. But as I said, it's an acquired taste, and once the penetrating clarity of a smaller choir starts to set in, you'll find a completely different Bach, clean, crisp and full of vigour. A perfect antidote to those so called 'interpretations' and mawkish romanticism imposed on the true Baroque. Highly recommended.

This recording dates from Bach's tercentenary in 1985. I had been used all my life to the B minor Mass given the epic treatment - not on the Crystal Palace Handel Festival scale, but with a large orchestra and chorus. To this day I'm only partially convinced that the new one-voice-per-choral-line style is the only way the work can be done. What Bach allegedly `intended' doesn't seem to me to settle the issue - I suspect that if he had had any opportunity of any kind to give a performance he might have been quite flexible regarding its scale. This is true after all of much choral music of the time. Handel availed himself of big battalions when he could get them, and he had 500 performers for Zadok the Priest on one occasion, although that work makes its effect perfectly well with a small chorus. In general the pseudo-purist view that there is only one way of doing things was a later phenomenon. Had you known that nearly all the music of the B minor Mass is actually recycled from Bach's earlier works? There is a flaw somewhere in the romantic reasoning that so sublime a composition must have descended from on high, the composer swept along on a divine afflatus that dictated its unique perfection. Even the Sanctus itself, perhaps the greatest thing in a work where transcendental greatness seems the norm, dates from the composer's 30's. If the music itself was put together on such a mix-and-match basis, surely there can be more than one way of performing it.

What a scholarly interpretation like this ought to do for us is to make our minds more flexible and our receptivity to the music more adaptable. The scale of the forces employed really has nothing to do with the scale of the inspiration or of its impact on us. Beethoven's string quartets are not lesser works than his symphonies, and those in their turn can be highly effective on the piano, as Liszt shows in the case of Beethoven and as Brahms shows in his own corresponding works. The mightiest effects in the B minor mass, such as the very start or such as the Sanctus or such as the conclusion, cannot be reduced in scale in any adequate performance. The most that can be said is that a small ensemble makes large concert-halls less suitable for hearing and performing them. There are obvious compensations too. Bach's vocal writing is often extremely difficult, its basis in instrumental thinking providing a severe test for single voices and more severe still when a massed chorus has to try to make it distinct at any reasonable speed.

Such is the calibre of the experts, scholars and specialists in `ancient music' these days that it should not be hard for any of us to adapt to this type of performance, unfamiliar as it may be at first. Singers of the calibre we have here are not fatigued by the unremitting effort demanded of them, and the quality of their work stays at the highest level to the very end. Emma Kirkby's voice is of course highly distinctive, but if it doesn't suit you here it presumably wouldn't have suited you in a traditional reading of the work either. She and all the others combine superbly in the concerted numbers, and the tone of the period instruments is such as we have had time to get used to, surely, 20 years on from the time of the recording. No dawdling is allowed, but the tempi strike me as unlikely to give much problem even to conservative listeners, and there is really tremendous Bachian power and expressiveness in such numbers as the Crucifixus.

I'm prepared simply to take the `new' approach (new 20 years ago) on faith, and I didn't have to struggle to do that. Nor do I have any problem with how the B minor Mass, composed or compiled in the way it was, manages to be as transcendentally great as it does, because I simply do not ask myself such a question. For me it remains here as big a thing as it ever was. The recorded quality is not such as I might have wanted in Rimsky-Korsakoff or Mahler, but another extraordinary thing about this greatest (I often think) of all composers is that he can do with less in that respect as well without being in any way diminished.

This is some of the best music I have ever heard and I am a Muslim. Andrew Parrott's outstanding version easily towers over Gardiner's attempt. For one thing, the music is more intricate and the complex contrapuntal lines can be easily heard. The choir and the orchestra are outstanding. Unlike Gardiner, who just rushes through the magnificent choruses, Parrott's tempos dance and are just right. This is the set to own, but if your somebody who hates the "one voive per part" to the mass in b minor then you should check out Phillipe Herreweghe's recording on Harmonia Mundi. But in my opinion nothing can surpass Parrott's account.

Whilst it has been said that this recording of Bach's Mass in B Minor is a touch clinical, I have to admit I actually prefer this to other recordings. The soloists are very good and both Emma Kirkby and Panito Iconomou have richly evocative voices. The choir is also very good and Parrott conducts them all with aplomb. This piece (and often this recording in particular) is often recommended by various sources as a `must have' to get your classical collection started, in fact that is how I came to find this, and I have to say after listening to more classical music in general and other recordings of this I have to agree. It is a gentle way to ease yourself into a Mass of this kind and shouldn't overwhelm you. I still enjoy putting this on at odd moments and this is one recording you will keep coming back to.

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Parrott's performance with the Taverner Consort of Bach's magnificent Mass in B minor is rightly considered to be one of the best recordings currently available. It is a haunting and introspective version of the Mass, with soloists used in place of the more typical choir-based renditions. The choice to use soloists instead of choirs could have been considered a gamble: the exacting standards necessary for the success of such a detailed and complex piece could have easily been missed by many a soloist, leaving the entire performance in shambles. But the choice of soloists here was an excellent one, and these performers pull off Parrott's vision of how the Mass should be performed.

What Parrott has achieved is a deeply personal and intimate incarnation of Bach's Mass, bringing the emotion and sorrowful pathos of the story into clear view. The performers show a remarkable control over some truly difficult performance requirements, and the use of soloists allows the story to be told in a more subtle, almost conversational, manner. This is Bach in the small room, not the orchestral hall, and is perhaps closer to Bach's original intentions for the Mass (although that is open to debate).

It is valuable to point out that Parrott's rendition may be easily compared with another critically acclaimed recording of the Mass which makes use of full choir and orchestra and therefore represents a significantly different view of the Mass. That recording would almost be certainly be Gardiner's 1980's recording Bach - Mass in B minor / Argenta, Nichols, Chance, Stafford, Milner, W. Evans, Gardinerof the piece with the English Consort, a recording which has been considered one of the greatest recordings of Bach's Mass since its release. Performed under the expert eye of Gardiner, performed by the world class English Consort, and recorded by Deutche Grammophon, this work explodes into view with tremendous power and vitality. It, however, contrasts greatly with the more personal, and perhaps at times, sublime, Parrott rendition. Get them both to compare, but more so, to enjoy, because both are best of class performances of what some have called "the greatest piece of western music ever written."

Those who have read my previous reviews of baroque music might be very surprised that I'm enthusiastic about this release, as I have always leaned toward grand scale in these works, but as I get older (and hopefully wiser), I realise there are many convincing ways of performing these works. In particular, just because there is only one voice per part here doesn't mean that it is lacking something. I now feel it is possible to bring out Bach's cosmic vision with any size ensemble, what matters is that the performers (in particular the conductor) share Bach's vision, as Parrot clearly does here. What changed opened my mind about the performance of Bach's sacred works was realising that ensemble size does not make grandeur, but rather the size should correspond to the intimacy or lack thereof of the acoustic. An ensemble of this size in, say, Carnegie hall in summer would sound totally lackluster, because the acoustics would be insufficiently rich, whereas in the small, cold, highly resonant spaces that Bach performed in, one voice per part can sound totally appropriate. No matter what size group is used however, the performance will be lacking unless there is vision, and the artists here clearly posess it. The tempi and dynamics are very well judged, always natural and inherently musical, never sound like some artificial excercise. Comparing with Gardiner's contemporary release is very revealing, as I find the way Gardiner approaches this music to be completely stiff and mechanical, lacking totally in humanity. Ultimately what matters most of all is that the performance be a human one, and this certainly is.

In my lifetime the number of performers deemed necessary to perform Bach's major choral works has shrunk from a fairly mammoth scale to almost nothing. Now, while I accept the authenticists' arguments about contemporary performing practice, I am still left with a niggling feeling that the sheer scale and grandeur of Bach's inspiration and conception has been short-changed by the rigorous, somewhat puritanical application of these theories. I am not pleading for a return to the serried ranks of the Huddersfield Choral Society in their heyday - those sort of numbers certainly do muddy the waters of Bach's thrilling counterpoint. Nevertheless, at the back of my mind lies a strong suspicion that at the back of Bach's mind when he was writing these works lay a sound that was fuller and richer than we get from Andrew Parrott and the leanest of forces on these discs of the great B Minor Mass. (I admit I am a little less worried as it applies to the Passions which could be argued to benefit from a more intimate scale - though even there the choruses for the `turba' seem a little sparse for a crowd baying for blood as in the `Kreuzige, kreuzige' chorus from the John Passion.)

Certainly we know that contemporaries like Handel would pretty much take as many singers as they could get for any given performance of their choral works. Pragmatism like that applied to performances from the time of the Tudor and Renaissance church composers and were still necessary even for the supremely demanding Wagner who was frequently seeking to fill out the string sections of his orchestras with extra players. Did Bach really conceive the grand moments of the Mass - the Gratias agimus, the Credo, the Sanctus or the final Dona nobis pacem - with such a lean choral sound in mind, despite the added glories of trumpets and drums? Even quieter moments like the wonderful, mystical harmonies of the Et incarnatus or the heartbreaking, shifting harmonies of the Crucifixus with its amazing cadence and transition to the burst of joy of Et resurrexit seem a bit undernourished with such a small group of singers.

Having said that, the singers here are an impressive array of specialist performers, led by the likes of Emma Kirkby, Rogers Covey-Crump and David Thomas. I certainly have no quibble with the use of `authentic' singing techniques in Baroque music. The additional purity of intonation, the lack of Romantic appurtenances that they bring to a performance benefits this kind of music no end. And these are all - even the altos of the Tolzer Boys' Choir - top-notch interpreters of this music. I'm a little less happy about the direction of Andrew Parrott, though. In his efforts to remain true to a performing practice that eschewed modern over-interpretation, he ends up being a little four-square and plain-Jane. Certainly compared to John Eliot Gardiner's classic recording for Archiv. There, I think, you will find the best of period performance. The choir is large enough to give the necessary gravitas to the grander movements. And there is terrific lift and ebullience to Gardiner's rhythms in the faster movements (e.g. the Gloria, Cum Sancto Spiritu, Et expecto, etc.) It's not a matter of tempi - they are, for the most part, pretty similar in both performances - it's a more a question of (dare I say) spirit.

In summary, I would still choose Gardiner as the performance I return to most. However, at such a seriously low price, the Parrott is worth exploring if you want to hear for yourself the strictest period performance theories put into practice.

Enjoyed this version of Bach's Mass. It's nice to

hear it one voice on a part - quite different than

the sometimes overpowering big choir recordings.

One voice has just a touch too much vibrato, but that is

a small gripe. Overall, very good blend of voices. You can hear the

individual lines clearly, especially in sections like

the Kyrie, Credo and Confiteor. Worth listening to especially for

the big polyphonic movements. Recommended!