Bach: Mass in B minor. Rebecca Myers, soprano; Aryssa Leigh Burrs, mezzo-soprano; Emily Marvosh, contralto; Jacob Perry, tenor; Edward Vogel, baritone; Paul Max Tipton, bass-baritone; Apollo’s Singers and Apollo’s Fire conducted by Jeannette Sorrell. AVIE. $32.99 (2 CDs).
Rozalie Hirs: come sempre; Alba Potes: TRINOS; Kaija Saariaho: From the Grammar of Dreams; Jeffrey Holmes: NauðaR Níu (The Nine Needs); Pascal Dusapin: Two Walking; Marti Epstein: Melisande. Susan Narucki, soprano; Kirsten Ashley Wiest, coloratura soprano. New Focus Recordings. $20.99.
An extraordinary fusion of historically informed performance with tremendously accessible, audience-focused presentation, the Apollo’s Fire presentation of Bach’s Mass in B minor is one of those rare recordings that is both intellectually impressive and emotionally compelling. It is certainly not necessary to be Catholic to become enraptured by this music – after all, Bach himself was a devoted Lutheran, and his creation of this Catholic Mass has always been slightly puzzling. Nor is familiarity with Latin necessary, so well does Bach set the words to music and so attractively do the soloists and chorus present them. The verbiage and music alike reach out directly to listeners, wherever they may be playing this AVIE release, just as they reach out across the two centuries since Bach assembled this Mass in its final form. Jeannette Sorrell is a remarkably thoughtful and remarkably perceptive conductor, highly sensitive to the many moods of this Mass and the differing orchestrations and styles through which Bach put it together. Solid scholarship and understanding underlie this recording – along with truly outstanding sound – but they remain wholly in the background where the audience is concerned, which is as it should be. Bach intended the words here to affirm and cement faith; Sorrell extends that mission of affirmation to apply to the music in and of itself. For example, the proclamations by trumpets and timpani at the start of the Gloria section, after the solemnity and structural regularity of the Renaissance-style conclusion of the Kyrie, immediately pull the listener into a bright and celebratory world – indeed, this Mass is more in D major, which dominates in the Gloria and elsewhere, then in its B minor first segment. The passion of the vocal delivery by soloists and chorus never flags in this performance, and if it does not reflect the Christian Passion to all contemporary listeners, that is of small account: the emotional arousal and multifaceted communicative powers of the music sweep the audience along through moods of uncertainty and sorrow to ones of glorification, hoped-for salvation (which one can define however one wishes), and eventually – and this is really Bach’s point as well as Sorrell’s – to peace. The fact that the traditional Mass ends with a plea for peace has always been one of its most salient features: after all the concerns and fears and familiar words of praise have been put forth, the eventual wish is not for a grand resurrection of believers or eternal punishment of nonbelievers, but simply for peace. Bach handles the Dona nobis pacem with exceptional sensitivity, to which Sorrell and Apollo’s Fire thoroughly resonate: the dynamics, whose careful balance is a highlight throughout this performance, beautifully reflect Bach’s conclusion with the celebratory melding of trumpets and drums, turning the ending of the Mass in B minor into a prayer whose fulfillment is assured, not one (as in many other composers’ settings) in which the finale calls for something desired but by no means certain. Sorrell’s vocal soloists are one and all focused on clarity of verbal delivery and production of emotional heft for the words: the wording is formulaic, but the delivery most assuredly is not. The two-dozen-strong period-instrument orchestra and 22-member chorus are balanced in much more than their size: these are the forces that Bach himself requested for this Mass, although he did not always get what he wanted. What matters here is that the grandeur of the work comes through far more clearly with these relatively modest performance numbers than with the much larger instrumental and vocal groupings often used for it (even in other period-instrument presentations). The balance is overtly to the vocal elements, as is abundantly clear again and again, as when the solo voices enter one at a time to build the start of the Credo. But the subtlety and elegance of the instrumentation also come through again and again – from the exceptional use of high-register natural horn in the Quoniam to the intimacy of solo tenor with flute and continuo in the Benedictus. Every element of the Mass is carefully considered and lovingly shaped in this memorable performance, which is one of those rare recordings that sound as if they simply flow together with natural, forthright elegance – a sure indicator of how much thought, analysis and rehearsal were needed to attain this level of apparent ease of flow and apparent simplicity of emotive display.
It goes without saying that nothing as resplendent as Bach’s Mass in B minor is being created by contemporary composers – indeed, it is arguable that the work is one of a kind and has never been matched by anyone. But composers before, during and after Bach’s time had their own ideas about communicating feelings, emotions and meanings through the human voice – and treating the voice sometimes as an instrument rather than, or in addition to, a deliverer of text. This last approach has become far more common in modern music and is taken to something of an extreme on a new (+++) release from New Focus Recordings, featuring Susan Narucki and Kirsten Ashley Wiest. The human voice is absolutely central here: five of the six works on the CD are written for two voices without instruments. This puts on the vocalists alone the requirement to deliver whatever meaning – or meaningless sounds – the composer wishes listeners to hear. Exactly what that is varies quite a bit from piece to piece, but it is safe to say that nothing here would ever be mistaken for anything by Bach – or anything partaking of his penchant for verbal clarity. The disc opens with Rozalie Hirs’ 2025 come sempre (spelled all in lowercase) – in which the words are clear enough for anyone who knows Italian, the language into which Hirs’ poem, originally in Dutch, is here translated. Next is Alba Potes’ 2024 TRINOS (spelled all in uppercase), a set of 12 under-a-minute verbal snippets that take the voices to extremes in an of embrace microtonal intervals. The work is gestural rather than word-focused in putting forth a variety of landscapes, ranging from the dramatic to the almost-lyrical. Kaija Saariaho’s From the Grammar of Dreams (1988) consists of five Sylvia Plath excerpts in which the text is subsumed within an environment of heavy breathing, vocalise, syllabification, trills, and occasional cooperative duality. Language is the basis here but scarcely the point: this is environment creation through vocal piling-on. Jeffrey Holmes’ 2025 NauðaR Níu (The Nine Needs) is indeed in nine segments, and differs from the works elsewhere on the CD in including percussion – which strikes periodically as if to underline the words or place them in a kind of ritual context defined by chimes and gongs. The texts may or may not be the point: as the work’s title indicates, they come from Old Norse and are scarcely likely to be comprehensible to any contemporary audience except as sound patterns – which put them in a “grammar of dreams” of their own. The relief of hearing something other than the two intertwined female voices does, however, make this work stand out from those surrounding it on the disc. Pascal Dusapin’s Two Walking (1994) is a five-item Gertrude Stein evocation, and Stein’s repetitive absurdist disconnected prose would seem to be quite strange enough to fit naturally into a recording such as this one. But Dusapin taffy-pulls the verbiage through extended vocal techniques, odd interminglings of syllables and rhythmic fragments, and a structure that imposes irreconcilable oddity on material that, truth be told, is quite odd enough on its own. The CD then concludes with Marti Epstein’s Melisande, a 2022 work that at 13 minutes is by far the most extended single track on the disc. It uses Maurice Maeterlinck texts from his Pelléas and Mélisande, but instead of accentuating or even exploring the ethereality of the stage work, much less its many portentous or mysterious silences, Epstein has the voices now laid over each other, now producing back-and-forth call-and-response passages, now simply offering sounds that complement or contrast between the vocalists. It is interesting that Dusapin and Epstein source their works to literary antecedents already well outside the mainstream – deconstructionist cubism for Stein, Symbolism for Maeterlinck – and seek to take matters into ever-more-abstruse realms. All the works on this CD actively assert their avant-garde bona fides and have very little in common with musical/vocal endeavors of the past in terms of clarity or desired non-superficial audience connection. What they do show, however, is that composers of every age have perceived the human voice as a significant communicative element that can be used to uplift, elucidate, explore, confuse or bewilder an audience in ways that instruments are not able to do on their own.
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