What was billed as the Bach Collegium Japan’s first major UK residency was a compact, intense 26 hours of, yes, Bach, beginning on Friday night with the B minor Mass and ending the following evening with the Magnificat. Most of the daylight hours in between were filled with Bach talks, the BCJ’s lunchtime Bach concert, a Bach lecture-recital from harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, even some Bach singing for the audience. Still, if any composer’s music bears and indeed repays such exclusive immersion, this is the one.
Masaaki Suzuki and his players have recently completed their two-decade-long project to record all Bach’s church cantatas. Only one of those featured in the evening concert alongside the Magnificat – the fragment that is Bekennen will ich seinen Namen, a single, emollient aria beautifully delivered here by countertenor Robin Blaze alongside the duetting violins of Ryo Terakado and Yukie Yamaguchi, with Suzuki on chamber organ. The two violinists had been the soloists in the D minor Double Concerto, in which Terakado’s more refined tone was a good foil for Yamaguchi’s earthier sound, and they had led the larger orchestral forces in the Suite No 3 in D major, with the trumpets and timpani blending uncommonly well into the ensemble sound. In each work, as ever with the BCJ, the playing was poised, graceful, rarely playful – never forced, and not trying too hard for effect.
The Magnificat’s crisp choruses showed Suzuki’s success in building up the BCJ’s choir. The soloists for this included, as a late stand-in, Rachel Nicholls, whose voice has been changing since she recorded the B minor Mass with the BCJ a few years ago; she now sings Wagner’s Isolde. In Suscepit Israel she managed to fine down her voice to balance with Blaze and with Joanne Lunn’s more slender yet still bright soprano even if she seemed, understandably, to be keeping that voice on a very tight leash.
