Where resides the best Bach Orchestra and Chorus in the world? Leipzig? Berlin? Germany at least? Amsterdam – where the great Bach tradition still lives on vibrantly? London, where the early music movement attained its first heights? Maybe, but for my money try Kobe, Japan[1]. Forgive for a second the hyperbole of “best”: there are other really, really fine ensembles that do Bach extremely proud. But the Bach Collegium Japan (BCJ) and its founding director Masaaki Suzuki are are part of the exclusive high-end of interpreters of the Leipzig’s Master and need yield to no one in the quality of their Bach performances.
BCJ @Konzerthauswien
Concert will start from 19:30 https://t.co/JfvAyoN2KT pic.twitter.com/4iqaYJ5f8v— Bach Collegium Japan (@bach_collegiumE) April 15, 2016
Founded in 1990, the group embarked in 1995 upon a project to record all the cantatas that Bach wrote. This impressive achievement will be finished any day now, with the last of the secular cantatas being releases this year. Being an inveterate lover of Bach cantatas and their recordings, I’ve followed this cycle (on BIS) from relatively early on, though my hard-earned money was, in those student days, on Ton Koopman and his Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra which the Erato had started. That project was unceremoniously dumped by the label, much like John Eliot Gardiner’s similar beginnings of a cycle were aborted by Deutsche Grammophon’s Archiv sublabel. Both conductors managed to found and fund their own recording cycles, subsequently… so not all was lost. But BIS stayed on course. Early on, I found Suzuki and his Bach-singing and -playing ilk a little fast, a little on the cold, technical side, but undeniably precise… impressive, if not quite my thing. This impression changed, somewhere around volume 20 or 23. Suddenly these performances, still drawn with a knife and in every way impeccable, also attained a greater sense of warmth and glowing geniality and the soloists that Suzuki employed – especially some of the female voices – went from very good to good-as-it-gets: Thank you Carolyn Sampson and Dorothee Mields and Hana Blažíkova, among others!
Little wonder that their last (sacred) Cantata release landed on my “Best Recordings of 2013” list: “what comes to a very happy conclusion [here] is nothing less than the far and away finest, most dedicated Bach Cantata cycle that a label started and finished”. Their recording of the Motets packs an uncommonly edgy punch, and their Mass in B minor competes with the best. As Shirley Apthorp wrote in the Financial Times back in 2006, “Connoisseurs agree that Suzuki’s recordings of Bach cantatas are the best being released on CD today. And they sell… With glowing reviews and a loyal audience around the world, the series is thriving. […] A journalist friend, [Suzuki] relates, recently researched the use of the word ‘cantata’ in the Japanese press. Before 1995, the word was unknown. When Suzuki’s BIS recordings began to hit the shops, the references started.”
Suzuki doesn’t approach the cantatas as a complete stranger; the offspring of a protestant family in Japan was at least religiously simpatico with Bach… and his German is fluent after having taught harpsichord for a couple years in Duisburg. He and many of his singers and players are interested not just in the music but the theological and linguistic aspects of the cantatas and they seem to have thrown themselves into this ultimately life-long, life-affirming project with stereotypical Japanese dedication. I have heard it said that the conversion rate to Protestantism has risen with statistical significance in the region, since Suzuki and his dedicated Bachians have started performing the Cantatas… apparently touching on a spiritual void in Japan. I certainly believe it; the feelings that Bach’s music instills in myself for one are of a nature that are regularly associated with religion: A radiance, a calm inner joy, a deep and pervading sense of humility and a glimmer of powerful hope. Romain Rolland and his “oceanic feeling” are in the wings.
Indeed, Uwe Siemon-Netto quotes Suzuki in his article “J.S. Bach in Japan” saying that “what people need in this situation is hope in the Christian sense of the word, but hope is an alien idea here. Our language does not even have an appropriate word for hope. We either use ibo, meaning desire, or nozomi, which describes something unattainable.” “After every one of the Bach Collegium’s performances”, Siemon-Netto continues, “Suzuki is crowded on the podium by non-Christian members of the audience who wish to talk to him about topics that are normally taboo in Japanese society—death, for example. And then they inevitably ask [Suzuki] to explain to them what ‘hope’ means to Christians.”
I rather doubt that many converts to Protestantism resulted from the Bach Collegium Japan’s current European tour, but they will have left a trail of converts to their way of performing Bach. The BCJ brought with them a large program consisting on most stops of the Mass in B minor but also two standout cantatas – the bi-partite, dramatic show-off “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis” (BWV 21) and the hauntingly beautiful “Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust” (BWV 170) for solo alto – coupled with the aptly named Magnificat. It was the latter program – still more dear to me, because cantatas well done are more rarely heard than good Masses in B minor – they performed at the Konzerthaus in Vienna on Friday, April 16th.
Now it isn’t easy to fill a concert hall – much less a big symphonic one like the Konzerthaus’ Great Hall – by putting on Bach cantatas. And this challenging endeavor isn’t made any easier by presenting a Japanese group doing Bach. Not in Vienna, certainly, where the group’s fame hasn’t quite yet arrived. Subtle prejudices go a long way, especially in the music world: “Only Czechs get Janáček right!”; “You need to own a pair of Lederhosen to do Mahler justice[2] – or be a Jewish composer-conductor yourself”; “What could Asians possibly teach us about Bach?” Well, it’s true that lazy locals have a leg up on grasping the idiom than sloppy strangers, but that doesn’t apply to willing, hard-working, diligent groups and certainly not to the Bach Collegium Japan.
In any case, the point is that the Konzerthaus has to be congratulated on making the (economically) gutsy move and add this superlative band into their Cantata cycle (which had long been monopolized by local mediocrities) and raise the bar by adding the likes of Gardiner, and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra with the RIAS Chamber Choir, and Ton Koopman etc. – in short: the cream of the cream and exactly what Bach and the Bach-loving Viennese audience deserve!
I heard the Bach Collegium Japan almost exactly a decade ago for the first (sadly until now only) time: at the Library of Congress with different concertos but without their superb chorus. Expectations were high then (and nearly met); they were higher even now as this was one of the most anticipated concerts of the year for me. This can mean setting oneself up for disappointment, but fortunately that’s not how it played out. From the Sinfonia of BWV 170, a moment of outstanding beauty even in as supreme output as Bach’s, it was mostly blissful listening. Perhaps the most outstanding part of the whole outfit is the chorus: You can understand every word with the Bach Collegium Japan, better than with any German or Dutch choir. And not only can the audience understand the text… it’s clear that the chorus does, too. The marriage of precision and liveliness is simply heartening.
The soloists were not uniform but at least pleasing and at best stunning. Joanne Lunn’s soprano is a wonderful instrument that works with very little vibrato and yet has a wide center, a rich and effective tone full of beauty. Only hear early top notes were approached a little tensely. Tenor Makato Sakurada (who stepped in for Colin Balzer) was pleasing and convincing right off the bat; disciplined and secure if not perhaps exciting in his recitative and first aria and then admittedly with some problems at the chosen tempo in the concluding aria, “Erfreue dich, Seele”. The cantata’s end is as jubilant as anything Bach wrote in his Christmas Oratorio; glorious C major trumpeteering and timpani-whacking… largely done from a group of instrumentalists that looked like loaners[3] from a city nearby, rather than Kobe. If so, they fit right in, though, and did a wonderful job. Suzuki, who has a tendency to go fast – both as a player and a conductor… and especially in the earlier days not always to completely consummate results – paced himself nicely as these three works bloomed under his crisp direction.
Countertenor Robin Blaze was the vocalist for the solo-alto cantata… and although he didn’t have his best day, sounding slightly ill at ease, he still managed to get across why he is one of the most coveted counter tenors for Bach these days, with a very pleasant timbre and a good deal of elegance even on an off-day. (He is also the soloist on the BCJ’s recording of BWV170.) Bass Dominik Wörner wasn’t particularly notable one way or the other… but the other soprano Hana Blažiková was, my goodness. When she had her outing during the concluding Magnificat, it was a kind-of jaw-dropping, mesmerizing moment to hear her voice break out from stage. It’s like a steel beam protruding… strong and solid and yet it isn’t harsh nor piercing but has a nice, just ever so slightly softening coating on that instrument to add a good dash of pleasantness to the impressiveness. And since the Magnificat employs two sopranos – most pointedly in the Terzetto “Sescepit Israel” (a moment of pure joy, that evening) where they sing together with the Alto – it was additionally beautiful to have two such impressive voices that were also so very different from each other.
What a difference, also, to hear this spirited and musical (near-) perfectionism compared to the Bach performances I recently experienced in the same town – whether the messy, exciting (and ultimately satisfying) train-wreck of a Matthew Passion of the Vienna Academy Orchestra under Martin Haselböck or the civilized boredom of the Vienna Symphony’s B minor Mass under Philippe Jordan. To anyone in the know, it can’t have been a surprise that this was the ticket! To anyone not in the know, they have probably become new admirers of the Bach Collegium Japan. And the Konzerthaus can be satisfied with a starry end to the 15/16 season of their annual Cantata subscription cycle which seems well on its way to becoming a mandatory event for Viennese Bach lovers if the quality of guest orchestras continues along these levels.
[1] To be precise, the BCJ has since relocated to Tokyo. Kobe, which is the origin of the BCJ and home of the Suzuki family, remains their second home. Kobe is where Masaaki Suzuki spent his childhood and where he started giving Baroque music concerts with his friends and that led him to collect musicians and singers and form BCJ. Part of the Kobe Shoin Women’s University, where Masaaki Suzuki has long taught, is the 1981 chapel (built by Tatsuji Hirashima to accommodate the new pipe organ and reproduce the acoustic of European churches) where all the sacred cantatas were recorded.
[2] This particular example of a prejudice comes from my writing, as it happens.
[3] As it turns, two of three trumpets and the timpanist (Guy Ferber, Hidenori Saito, trumpet and Thomas Holzinger, timpani) are BCJ regulars. Krisztián Kovats, the third trumpet, has worked with the BCJ on some previous projects in Europe. Although in a sense, there are no fix members, technically, as the BCJ is a project-based orchestra.
