Monday, March 29, 2010

Bach - Brandenburg Concertos - Christopher Hogwood - The Academy of Ancient Music (DECCA)


This is the first time I have heard one of my favorite works, Johann Sebastian Bach’s 6 Brandenburg Concertos, played in authentic instruments. I had always preferred recordings of baroque music with small-size ensembles, but played with modern techniques and in modern instruments (with the exception of the harpsichord, which, in the presence of a continuo part, must be included, or the music wouldn’t feel “baroque” to me.) The dry, cold sound of antique instruments can’t compete with the fuller, richer, warmer sound that contemporary ones can provide. But the current trend in classical music is to have baroque music played with the same forces and techniques that must have been the norm when they were composed and performed back in the late 17th, early 18th century. Thus, it was just a matter of time before I faced an authentic version of Bach’s orchestral masterpieces.

After having heard modern-instrument recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos for all my life, I can say I am less disappointed than I expected to be with my first taste of authentic-Brandenburgs. Though the dry sound and the lack of techniques like vibrato are all here, the music is played very energetically by The Academy of Ancient Music under the direction of Christopher Hogwood. His tempos, though faster than most (and faster than I would like) are consistently good and he never lets his musicians give anything but their best to make this set of concertos quite a satisfying but flawed experience. Though at times the dry and uneven sound of antique instruments gets in the way (like in the first movement of the first concerto where the horns practically devour all the rest of the instruments with a harsh, crude sound –could be the engineering, too-), the performance never sounds mechanic, it’s always full of vibrant life (it’s almost impossible to drain the life out of Bach’s music anyway).

Going into specifics, the rendering of the second concerto is one of the best I’ve heard, with all the right tempos, perfect phrasing, and a fantastic solo trumpet; the third, one of my favorites, is one of the weakest of the set, with an opening movement that fails to capture the spirit of Bach’s superb music, and a third one clear in its counterpoint but without the purely-musical drama that other versions have conveyed (I’m glad there were no bizarre experiments like in Marriner’s version; Hogwood left the cadence between the first and last movement intact); the fourth is efficiently played, the fifth is vibrant and another success, while the six, my least favorite concerto out of these 6 masterpieces, receives a by-the-number treatment that makes it the most forgettable one.

There’s but one real BIG complain here: in the spirit of being as authentic as possible, Hogwood used manuscript copies of the concertos for the orchestration and the music, and because of that, we’re deprived of the first concerto’s third movement and the Polonaise section in the last movement. There’s a few other changes in the instrument parts in all concertos, but the second most radical change appears in the fifth concerto, where Hogwood pretty much eliminated the long harpsichord solo at the end of the first movement. Though interesting ideas, these changes make this set suffer in comparison with other ones where the music itself has been left untouched. For this reason, I can’t recommend this version as the first one for someone trying to get familiar with the Brandenburg Concertos. This is an excellent addition to a collection with at least one other recording of these concertos already there.

Alongside the Brandenburgs we get three concertos that we usually find thrown around to fill space in recordings of Bach’s orchestral music: BWV 1060, here adapted for violin and oboe, BWV 1062 for two harpsichords, and BWV 1064, arranged by Hogwood himself for three violins. There are better versions of all three concertos, and their presence here, though welcomed, doesn’t make or break this album, which is worthy of recommendation, but with the reserves I’ve pointed out

3.5/5

No comments:

Post a Comment