Stephan MacLeod wears both his singer and conductor hats for this programme of showcasing J. S. Bach’s treatment of the oboe and the bass voice, two instruments Bach appears to have known intimately. With the oboe, both the oboe da caccia and the oboe d’amore first appeared in Leipzig while Bach was working there, and the body of music he produced for them covers a notably wide range of technical, sonic and expressive capabilities.
With the bass voice, this appears to have been Bach’s own vocal type, and his treatment of it is interesting because not only did he put it to a wide variety of dramatic uses, portraying characters from thundering preachers to desperate Christians, but it was also one he appears to have spotted a particular area of expressive strength for: it was the tessitura he used for Christ in the Passions, and for the evocation of God in certain cantatas; then zero in on the four surviving solo bass cantatas presented here, and no fewer than three of them – BWV 56, BWV 82 and BWV 158 – are concerned with portraying death as a hope-filled release from the struggles of the earthly body.
To deal with those three cantatas first, the closeness of the relationship here between MacLeod and his period-instrument Gli Angeli Genève is palpable, set off further by his big, rich and rounded vocal tones being a highly complementary foil for the ensemble’s crisply articulated, warm-toned sound; and MacLeod’s delivery of the texts is also all one could hope for, imbued with understanding lightly worn. The oboe element is no less enjoyable, with BWV 56’s aria of closely intertwined bass and oboe lines, ”Endlich, endlich wird mein Joch” , one of the recital’s stand-out moments for the pleasure-filled intimacy between MacLeod and oboist Emmanuel Laporte.
The Cantata BWV 203, “Amore, traditore”, is then an entirely different musical beast. Set to simple harpsichord accompaniment, this one is operatic in tone, and with a secular Italian text relating to an amorous deception. It isn’t even indisputably by Bach, given that it survives only via nineteenth-century copies – although musicologists have suggested 1720 (Bach’s Köthen period) as a credible date. Either way, though, here it serves as a delicious final palette-cleanser, MacLeod and harpsichordist Bertrand Cuiller serving up an elegantly sparkling double-act of spry keyboard passagework and subtly operatic vocal drama, complete with some gloriously pizazz-filled flourishes from Cuiller at the aria’s conclusion; and the generous acoustic of the Landgasthof Riehen Grosser Festsall makes its own fine contribution.
Great stuff.
© Charlotte Gardner/Qobuz