Bach Cantatas Vol. 53 – Suzuki

Nine hundred and some cantatas into a project nobody expected to finish — well, this one, anyway, I didn’t expect to live to see it finished — Masaaki Suzuki keeps finding ways to make devotional Leipzig counterpoint sound urgent. Volume 53 lands us in the lean years, after the great cycles were behind him, when Bach wrote cantatas the way a harried pastor fills an empty Sunday: because the calendar demanded it, not because inspiration struck unbidden. You would never guess the circumstances from the music.

BWV 97 opens with a French overture, of all things. Dotted rhythms, a stately processional swagger that has nothing to do with Pietist humility and everything to do with Bach showing off, even at this late date, that he could still out-French the French. Nine movements is a lot for an occasional piece with no clear occasion. Nobody knows why he wrote it, which is somehow fitting for music this strange and overbuilt. The chorus has real bite under Suzuki, not the plush, over-rounded sound some rival cycles favor, but something leaner: air moving through gut strings, a bassoon snorting companionably underneath.

Gerd Türk’s tenor aria in verse four is the disc’s real find. The violin obbligato twists with an almost violinistic desperation, long spun lines that refuse to resolve when you expect them to. Türk has been with this project since the Kobe sessions began in the mid-1990s, a veteran now of a hundred-odd cantatas, and he sings it with the kind of unforced, flexible tone that younger tenors spend careers chasing and rarely catch. There’s little strain at the top, which matters; this part sits high and stays there. The soprano-bass duet later on, Blažíková against Peter Kooij, is a lesson in contrast management: her tone bright, boyish almost, floating; his dark and granite-steady beneath. Neither singer crowds the other. That’s harder to achieve than it sounds.

Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ is the modest one here: five movements, written for the fourth Sunday after Trinity in 1732, built on Johann Agricola’s hymn. Agricola was a Lutheran pamphleteer-poet, friend of the Reformer himself, though you’d be forgiven for not knowing that walking in cold. Robin Blaze gets the gem, an alto aria over bare continuo, nothing to hide behind, and he doesn’t need to hide. His countertenor has mellowed over the years of this cycle into something less boyishly pure and more burnished, more vocally interesting for it — the kind of singing where you stop noticing the voice type and just listen to the line. Blažíková’s soprano aria that follows, cushioned by oboe da caccia with its nasal, autumnal color, is one of those moments Bach seems to have written purely for the pleasure of the sonority. Tone color as theology, almost.

The closing Es ist das Heil uns kommen her sets Paul Speratus’s great Reformation hymn, text that is essentially doctrinal shorthand for justification by faith. Dense stuff, theologically, and Bach does not condescend to it. Eighteen minutes, economically laid out, no wasted motion.

Should you need reminding why this cycle matters: there is no shortage of competition. Harnoncourt and Leonhardt gave us grit and historical conscience but sometimes raw intonation from the boy trebles. Koopman brought fire and occasional recklessness. Gardiner, in the Pilgrimage year, gave us drama and starry soloists and sometimes too much personality for the room. Suzuki’s achievement, across three decades now, has been consistency without blandness: the same chapel acoustic in Kobe, dry and clear, the same disciplined continuo group, the same unhurried tempos that never feel merely safe. This volume won’t convert anyone who dislikes the whole enterprise. But as another installment in what may be the most completely satisfying traversal of the cantatas we have on record, it is required listening. Modest forces, immodest achievement.