Bach Collegium Japan at Greyfriars Kirk ****

Published in The Times August 27th 2009

Greyfriars Kirk is taking the festival’s Enlightenment theme with single-minded precision, focusing on Bach’s cantatas.

Never mind the intellectual mix’n’matching of the rest of the International Festival programme this year, Greyfriars Kirk takes the Enlightenment theme with single-minded precision, focusing on Bach’s cantatas. The Bach Collegium Japan took on the solo cantatas, composed in the late 1720s when Bach, newly installed as cantor at St Thomas’s Church, Leipzig, scribbled a cantata for every Sunday of the year.

Masaaki Suzuki’s ensemble, whose reputation was forged with their prolific CD output of Bach cantatas, proved to be subtle partners with whom to discover the astonishing freshness of these solo works. Thankfully less digitally precise than on disc, the fleet Bach Collegium emphasise beauty and a flowing line, impeccable balance and tasteful caesuras. On occasions such silken treatment lacks impact. Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust (Contented rest, beloved inner joy, BWV 170), sung by an emollient, swooping Robin Blaze, verged on the anodyne, with Bach’s disturbed calm emerging in slow burn. The tenor Makoto Sakurada had some lovely moments in the redemptive Ich armer Mensch, ich Sündenknecht (I, wretched man, a slave to sin, BWV 55), although he tended to be drowned out by — and strained over — the orchestra.

But if there were problems with impact — an issue augmented from the “naughty seats” at the back under the organ (if you want to sit in the nave for these concerts, you need to turn up at least 30 minutes beforehand) — there were none with Rachel Nicholls in Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen! (Rejoice unto God in all lands!, BWV51). Nicholls’s rich soprano rang out, eloquently matched by Jean-François Madeuf, hand on hip, on a temperamental baroque trumpet. This was Bach’s most unusually scored cantata of the three, and a wonder at that, its final Hallelujah, trumpet again resplendent, fiendish, with Nicholls’s voice folding round the ensemble in voluptuous embrace.

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