JS Bach • James MacMillan: Motets and Sacred Songs
Tenebrae/Nigel Short
Signum Classics SIGCD773 79:32 mins
Somewhat surprisingly, Tenebrae hasn’t broached JS Bach on a recording thus far. And in another first, this splicing together of three of the Thomaskantor’s most famous motets with the music of James MacMillan isn’t a studio recording: it was captured live at Snape Maltings last May.
The Scottish composer’s Tenebrae Responsories are programmed alongside his 2009 setting of the Miserere, plus a premiere recording of ‘I Saw Eternity the Other Night’, a radiant and enrapt setting of words by the metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan commissioned for the 75th anniversary of the London Bach Society in 2021.
Nigel Short understands the theatre inherent in MacMillan’s approach to setting his texts, and he has a firm grasp of narrative, unswervingly attentive to every finely honed nuance. There’s a laser-sharp focus to the choir’s tuttis, and the interjections that lacerate the sepulchral soft-grained opening of ‘Tenebrae factus est’ go to the heart of the Good Friday anguish. Short also registers the shifting colours of the Miserere with a judicious feel for MacMillan’s deft chiaroscuro.
Bach’s irrepressible Singet dem Herrn, a concerto masquerading as a double-choir motet, proves to be a ricocheting explosion of joy incarnate; and Jesu, meine Freude is beautifully paced – ‘Gute Nacht, o Wesen’s unaffected simplicity, quietly compelling. But, for all the beguiling purity of sound, Komm, Jesu, Komm is less persuasive. There’s little sense of beseeching to the opening repetitions of the word ‘Komm’; the colouring of ‘müde’ (weary) misses an expressive trick; and the sheer buoyancy of ‘die Kraft vershwindt je mehr und mehr’ rather contradicts its meaning: my strength deserts me more and more. A rare misstep in an otherwise absorbing album. Paul Riley