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Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
Orpheus Chamber Orchestra
www.orpheusnyc.org
Performs:
Bach’s Easter Cantatas
At
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
www.metmuseum.org
Temple of Dendur in the Sackler Wing
Christina Jensen, Publicist
Cohn Dutcher Associates
www.cohndutcher.com
Nikolas J. Lund
March 23, 2007
Program:
Johann Sebastian Bach
Cantata No. 42 “Am Abend aber desselbigen Sabbats…” BWV 134
Cantata No. 134 “Ein Herz, das seinen Jesum lebend weiß…”
A concert this beautiful precludes most criticism per se. The Orpheus Ensemble tonight was playing at the same level as when I had seen them last, beautifully intonated at brisk tempi which held a perfect pace for a musical celebration proposing the jubilation of an Eastertide offertory. It was also my first opportunity to see one of New York’s finest chamber groups outside the uncomfortable sonic confines of Carnegie Hall, tonight in the Met’s Temple of Dendur gallery, which is unquestionably one of the city’s most beautiful spaces in which to hear an evening concert. The acoustic is rather unique given the audience’s close proximity to the musicians in the center of such a massive volume. The sound is immediate and warm, haloed slightly from above with its own warm reflection.
The singers were the ones who benefited most from the generous sound. Bach’s writing for the voice “works” so well because his vocal writing generally makes the same demands for an honest and reasoned virtuosity as the rest of his instrumental writing. To this end, the soloists all had an opportunity to revel in the expression of meditations divine. There were moments when the line perhaps did not hold with all the precision of the strings, but in singing through every repeat, the triumph of musical truth was always assured.
The two cantatas tonight were also generally glorious works throughout, suffused with highly variegated material, evoking the secular and the spiritual and so much else as they ran a wide course of experience in their narrative of Luther’s poetry. There was solemnity and tragedy of course, and suffering—but also an elevated irony in sections like the second Aria of No. 42 (“Verzage nicht, o Häuflein klein…”) whereby the “musical humor” of certain later-comers suddenly reads in contrast like so much shallowness. And then there is the enthusiasm of an expression like the “Auf, Gläubige” in No. 134 which does, I think, remain quite effective in its urging. Auf auf! Auf auf!
As Sviatoslav Richter once lamented of the Cantatas, the tragedy is that one could never hope to hear them all in one’s lifetime. But as works like these already seem to contain the breadth of a entire lifetime within them, it is perhaps sufficient enough to make sure that one ventures upon them from time to time in a space of warmth and reverence.
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