Johann Sebastian BACH (1685-1750)
Brandenburg Concertos, BWV 1046-51 (1721)
Il Gusto Barocco/Jörg Halubek (harpsichord)
rec. 3-4 August 2019, Orangerie zu Ansbach, Germany
BERLIN CLASSICS 0301676BC [40:02 + 52:31]
The question with the Brandenburgs is never whether they’re great—that’s settled—but whether a particular reading justifies its place in an already groaning discography. Jörg Halubek and Il Gusto Barocco, recorded in the Orangerie zu Ansbach in August 2019, make a case that’s intermittently persuasive but ultimately uneven.The first concerto opens promisingly enough. Those two horns—always the acid test—negotiate their treacherous hunting calls with commendable security, though the tone gets a bit pinched in the upper register. More troubling is the overall sound picture: the disc places us at a middle distance, neither intimate nor spacious, and the balance feels cautious. The violino piccolo in the Polacca sits too far back; you sense the player’s fingers dancing but can’t quite hear the bite of gut on wood.
Halubek directs from the harpsichord with intelligence if not always inspiration. Tempos in the Third are brisk—perhaps too brisk for the opening Allegro, where ensemble unanimity occasionally frays at the edges. The famous two-chord Adagio between movements becomes a mere punctuation mark rather than a moment of harmonic speculation. Did they even consider ornamentation? One longs for the risk-taking that marks the greatest performances, that sense of musicians thinking aloud together.
The Fourth fares better. Here the two recorders (assuming they’re recorders and not traversos, though the liner notes are maddeningly vague on instrumentation) blend beautifully with the solo violin, creating those shimmering textures Bach surely imagined. The slow movement breathes properly—finally—with phrases that swell and recede like natural speech. The violinist plays with genuine affection, not just technical accuracy.
But then comes the Fifth, and we’re back to problems. This is Bach’s great keyboard showpiece, the concerto where the harpsichord stops being continuo and becomes protagonist. Halubek’s cadenza is note-perfect but oddly reticent, as if he’s afraid to really dig into the rhetoric. The famous cascade of demisemiquavers sounds more dutiful than exhilarating. Compare this to Trevor Pinnock’s white-hot intensity with the English Concert, or even Café Zimmermann’s more recent traversal, and you realize what’s missing: danger, personality, the sense that something might actually happen.
The Sixth—always problematic without the darker-toned violas da gamba to anchor the texture—sounds thin and undernourished here. The two violas work hard, but they’re fighting the acoustic, which seems to absorb rather than project the lower strings. And where’s the cello? It occasionally emerges from the texture like a swimmer coming up for air, then disappears again.
Technical standards throughout are high, certainly. Il Gusto Barocco plays with the clean articulation and stylistic awareness we’ve come to expect from German period ensembles. But high standards aren’t enough when you’re competing with Café Zimmermann, the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, and yes, still, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, whose earlier recordings for Harmonia Mundi remain benchmarks of vitality and interpretive depth.
The sound itself—recorded in that Orangerie—promises more than it delivers. You’d expect warmth, resonance, a sense of space. Instead, everything sounds slightly compressed, as if the engineers were determined to avoid any hint of ambient bloom. The harpsichord tone is clear but oddly clinical; you hear the mechanism more than the music.
Where this set succeeds is in moments of chamber-music intimacy: the dialogue between oboe and violin in the First’s slow movement, the gentle lilt of the Second’s Andante (though the trumpet, thank goodness, doesn’t overwhelm). These are musicians who listen to each other, who understand Bach’s conversational genius. But understanding isn’t quite the same as illuminating.
For collectors who already own Pinnock, Café Zimmermann, or the Boston Baroque under Martin Pearlman, there’s little here to compel an addition. For someone building a library, this set would serve adequately—it won’t offend, won’t embarrass—but neither will it transport. The Brandenburgs deserve more than adequacy. They demand interpreters willing to take chances, to find something new in music we think we know by heart.
Il Gusto Barocco plays it safe. Too safe.
