Bach Ascension Cantatas by Gardiner

Ascension was always Bach’s most theatrically irresistible liturgical occasion. The theological drama is built right in: a body, risen, now departing — upward, physically, impossibly — while the disciples stand slack-jawed on a hillside. Bach understood this as pure spectacle, and across these four cantatas he responded with some of his most unabashedly festive writing, trumpets blazing, the earth practically shaking the congregation’s pew-backs.

This release — the twenty-eighth volume in John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage series, and one that by all accounts nearly vanished entirely — arrives with the particular glow of a thing rescued. The backstory matters here. The original Pilgrimage performances in 2000 were compromised by traffic noise bleeding into Salisbury Cathedral, and those recordings were quietly shelved. What we have instead are performances from St. Giles Cripplegate in May 2012, patched over two subsequent days, a full dozen years after the Pilgrimage itself. It’s an unusual situation. The disc is simultaneously a document of something new and an act of archaeological recovery.

Gardiner is seventy now. The occasion seems to have sharpened him.

BWV 43 opens the program, and the choice is apt — this is the most physically exhilarating of the four. The opening chorus erupts almost without warning: a few bars of deceptive, almost pastoral calm, then the trumpets arrive and the whole edifice ignites. Bach apparently modeled the cantata on the work of his distant cousin Johann Ludwig Bach, several of whose cantatas he had performed earlier in 1726, that same year. The relationship between the two branches of the family — Johann Sebastian the acknowledged genius, Johann Ludwig the diligent provincial — is genuinely interesting musicological territory, and it surfaces audibly here. There’s an architectonic grandeur to BWV 43’s construction that feels like Bach absorbing and then simply overwhelming whatever model he’d studied.

The Dutch soprano Leneke Ruiten is new to me, or was. Her aria “Mein Jesus hat nunmehr” is a pleasure — the tone clear and unaffected, the ornamentation tasteful without being timid. Whether she would survive the scrutiny of a complete opera role I couldn’t say from this alone, but in this context she’s entirely right.

Then there is the question of the alto.

Gardiner’s earlier release of this repertoire — the 2000 DG Archiv release, made partly as far back as October 1993 — featured Michael Chance and Robin Blaze, two countertenors whose tonal profiles are as different from each other as either is from a female mezzo. Here Meg Bragle takes the alto parts. This is not a trivial substitution, and Gardiner presumably knew it wouldn’t be received as one. The debate about voice types in Bach — whether the original use of boy altos or adult male voices in the alto register constitutes an authentic sound worth approximating — has been grinding on for fifty years without resolution, and it probably deserves to keep grinding. What Bragle brings is warmth and a slightly earthward weight that suits the music’s devotional gravity, even if something of the ethereal distance that Chance especially could produce is lost.

BWV 37 and BWV 128 are works of the middle cantata period, 1724 and 1725 respectively — the years of Bach’s great chorale cantata cycle, though BWV 37 is not strictly a chorale cantata in that formal sense. Both are compact, economical, and marvelously assured. Bach was producing this music at a pace that defies imagination — a new cantata virtually every week, rehearsed with a choir of teenagers, performed once, and filed away. The miracle is not that some of it is routine but that so little of it is.

BWV 11, the so-called Ascension Oratorio, closes the program and provides its grandest proportions — nearly twenty-eight minutes, a scale that lets Gardiner and his forces breathe. The Monteverdi Choir is in outstanding form throughout, but here especially one notices the precision of the ensemble, the clean articulation of the continuo instruments, the sense of a group that has been playing this music together long enough to trust each other completely. Andrew Tortise is a reliable tenor, and reliable is not a dismissive word in this context; the music demands steadiness as much as brilliance.

What distinguishes this from the 2000 Archiv release is harder to pin down than I expected. Gardiner has not changed his fundamental interpretive stance — the tempos are brisk without being pressured, the affect is direct, the theological content is taken seriously rather than aestheticized into abstraction. But there is, I think, a slight relaxation of urgency, an ease that comes from long familiarity. Some conductors grow more anxious with repertoire they know well; Gardiner seems to grow more settled. The live acoustic of St. Giles suits him.

Nearly lost, now found. That is enough of a recommendation to start with — and the music, alive on this disc, makes its own argument from there.