Review: Motets: Bach and his Forefathers ****
11 May 2011
ST MARY'S METROPOLITAN CATHEDRAL, EDINBURGH
CONRAD WILSON
MESSIAH and the Matthew Passion remain the annual staples of the Dunedin Consort's repertoire. But Bach means more than the Matthew, just as Handel means more than Messiah, and Edinburgh's inspired little chorus is touring Scotland this week with a fascinating programme of other things.
Though Bach with a capital "B" provided the evening's structure in the form of three of his six great motets, several older Bachs filled the gaps with fine music that must have been as unfamiliar to most of the audience as it was to me. With some interesting new voices and faces among the octet of singers, even the Swinging strains of the well-known Singet dem Herrn sounded utterly fresh.
Each line of music possessed not only its own individual sound but was stripped to its essence in a performance that made you understand what Mozart must have felt when he came upon this work in his famous visit to Leipzig in 1789. The two other motets Komm, Jesu, Komm and Jesu, meine Freude were similar marvels of elucidation and timbre in performances, conducted from the chamber organ by John Butt, to which a pair of string players contributed their own colouring to music where instrumental tone is still too often regarded as redundant.
Even without these masterpieces, however, the programme would have been something special, with each Bach ancestor - particularly Johann Christoph, a cousin of Bach's father, purveying beauty and imagination in
a pair of well-chosen motets -justifying his presence. Bach himself, it is said, wanted one of these works to be sung at his funeral and it is easy to see why.
