BACH

 

Christmas Oratorio BWV 248

 

Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Tenor

Nancy Argenta, Soprano

Anne Sofie von Otter, Soprano

Hans Peter Blochwitz, Tenor

Olaf Bär, Baritone

Ruth Holton, Soprano

Katie Pringle, Soprano

 

The Monteverdi Choir 

The English Baroque Soloists 

John Eliot Gardiner

 

As a practical musician working against the clock, Bach was a master recycler of his own music.  So when in 1734 he needed to produce six cantatas for services between Christmas Day and Epiphany, he cheerfully plundered a group of secular cantatas which he had composed for the Dresden court.

 

Scholars have turned mental somersaults trying to explain and justify this blurring of sacred and secular.  The test, of course, is whether the recycled numbers work in their new context.  Which they do. triumphantly.  Thus a chorus from a royal birthday cantata happily becomes the paean of praise that opens the first of the Christmas Oratorio’s cantatas, while a ravishing aria sung to the infant Hercules is transformed without incongruity into a lullaby for the sleeping Jesus.

 

More than any of Bach’s large-scale choral works, the Christmas Oratorio is permeated by the lilt of the dance, graceful or exuberant.  In the impressive recording conducted by Helmut Rilling (Hanssler 92076), grace can become rigid.  Not so in the 1987 recording from John Eliot Gardiner, who always has a wonderful natural feeling for Bach’s dance rhythms.

 

Gardiner’s direction is typically dramatic abetted by Anthony Rolfe-Johnson’s clear and expressive Evangelist, And only the superbly athletic Monteverdi Choir could manage Gardiner’s frisky tempo at the start of the fifth cantata without losing clarity.

 

The aria soloists are a match for any on disc.  Nancy Argenta sings her charming “Echo” aria ethereally, Olaf Bar is subtle and mellifluous in the bass arias, while Anne Sofie von Otter’s gravely tender cradle song is a highlight of the whole performance.

 

Richard Wigmore

The Telegraph

      

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