Musically, King’s most telling move is to use boys’ voices for all the soprano and alto parts, solo and chorus. He finds in the music a rapt yet calm spirituality that provides coherence to what is basically a collection of pieces in disparate styles, written at different points in Bach’s life. To risk an oversimplification, where Gardiner brought out the drama in the score, King emphasises its sense of mystery. The excellent new recording by Robert King and the King’s Consort can be said to take a further, albeit small, step back towards older performance traditions: his tempi are generally a shade slower than Gardiner’s, his choir and orchestra are a little larger and the overall effect is a touch more solemn. It is this version of Bach, what we could call a balance of new and old values, rather than the radical minimalism of Rifkin and Parrott, that has proved the more influential model for subsequent period performances of the Mass in B minor. In particular, his was a supremely well-paced performance the tempos fluent yet always sensitive to the music’s subtleties. Using four and five voices to a part (close to Bach’s ideal), Gardiner retained the vitality and flair of period performance while also recapturing much of the splendour and gravitas associated with more traditional approaches. Singing and playing are of a uniformly high standard but Parrott’s treatment of the Mass as virtually a chamber work results in a two-dimensional performance that is hard to enthuse over.ġ985 also saw the release of John Eliot Gardiner’s recording of the Mass (on Archiv), a set that for many people still remains the top recommendation. The brisk tempos also seem inappropriately lightweight at times, turning the opening Kyrie into a jog and failing to convey the expressive depths of the Agnus Dei. Though there are gains in terms of clarity of line and rhythmic litheness, most notably perhaps in a jubilant ‘Cum sancto spirito’, these are outweighed by a concomitant loss of textural contrast and dramatic power. (Rifkin’s researches into Bach’s work at Leipzig led him to conclude that choral pieces had often been performed there with these minimal forces.) Andrew Parrott’s 1985 EMI set, newly reissued on Virgin Veritas, follows Rifkin’s example except that he also adds a ripieno group of one extra voice per part – a decision partly in accord with period practice, since we know Bach himself divided his singers into concertists (ie soloists) and ripienists, though both Parrott and Rifkin ignore Bach’s stated desire to have at least three and preferably four voices per part in his church choirs.Įven with the ripieno, Parrott’s small-scale forces leave Bach’s music shorn of much of its majesty. The ‘authenticity’ movement quickly gathered momentum and in 1982 reached at least one kind of extreme when Joshua Rifkin recorded the B minor Mass with choruses that had only one voice to a part. Others, however, who found previous ‘heavier’ styles ponderous and oppressive, delighted in this vivid, revitalised Bach. Traditionalists were predictably shocked, seeing the new ‘lighter’ style as lacking in profundity and genuine emotional commitment. Employing faster tempos and a smaller number of performers than were then the norm, Harnoncourt unveiled a Bach of dancing rhythms and bright, transparent textures. Harnoncourt’s 1968 version of the Mass in B minor (reissued on Teldec in 1994) was the first recording of that work to use period instruments and to adopt a historically ‘authentic’ approach.
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