Cantatas by the calendar

I guess what triggered the cantata-hunt this time was having to miss out on the Trinity College Choir/OAE St John’s performance of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio on the Saturday before Christmas (I was pledged to a marvellous party instead, though we did get to the classiest of Messiahs in the same mini-festival the following evening). So on the day we turned to John Eliot Gardiner’s recording and I realized it could be parcelled out over six days’ worth of what in effect are discrete cantatas. After three days, that meant cheating slightly by leaping forward prematurely to the Feast of the Circumcision (New Year’s Day, the deed illustrated in Bellini’s lovely painting above), the first Sunday of the year and Epiphany.

Snip-day itself marked a proper start, which I intend to follow each Sunday, or as close to it as schedules allow (it’s a good way of getting to know the church calendar, too). I had three options, and the one most readily to hand was BWV 41, Jesu, nun sei gepreiset, in Masaaki Suzuki’s BIS recording with the Bach Collegium Japan. That entailed going back a decade from the mid-1730s cornucopia of the Christmas Oratorio to the Leipzig chorale cycle of 1725. Maybe there’s nothing as giddying as the weird harmonic progressions at the start of the Oratorio’s Epiphany cantata, but the treasury of obbligato solos is here, too, and one short but telling combined recitative where the bass is dramatically amplified by an urgent chorus on the line ‘Der Satan unter unsre Füße treten’ (‘May Satan be trodden under our feet’).

Unlike the oratorio, there’s no narrating Evangelist, so nothing about the snip ceremony (Signorelli's version above). Instead, this is a straightforward thanksgiving celebration of the new year, beginning with a 16th century hymn melody embroidered by three exultant trumpets and three oboes as well as leaping strings and continuo. Its novelty is an adagio episode when the chorus reflects on having ‘in good peace’ fulfilled the old year. The oboes adorn the soprano aria; to accompany the tenor’s central sentiments Bach asked for a cello piccolo, which Suzuki tells us was played laterally by a first violinist. His version uses a small five-stringed cello. Here’s the complete cantata in the old Harnoncourt recording on YouTube

Our quiet January the First turned out serendipitously well. The New Year’s Day concert from Vienna was a bit of a damp squib, without the esprit of Jansons or even Mehta (quite a pleasant surprise a couple of years ago), and certainly nowhere near the classic Carlos Kleiber or Karajan experiences. I can’t make Franz Welser-Möst out: he’s quite an elegant conductor, but Danube water rather than blood seems to flow in his veins. No comparison, then, with Kleiber's 1989 or 1992 concerts, both of which are absolutely complete on YouTube. I've been listening to the sound recording of the second, and recommend especially the ideal waltz, which as so often comes from Josef rather than Johann I or II: Dorfschwalben aus Österreich, beginning at 14'40.

Yesterday we had ze laughing, Austrian style, in the one 'comedy' routine of the programme proper – FWM self-consciously dolling out pertinent toy animals and a Valkyrie helmet, inter alia, to the orchestral soloists in the interminable Carnival in Venice variations (weren’t they more fun a couple of years ago?). And the percussionists' lame dialogue in the encore Plappermäulchen Polka, my favourite thanks to the lines we gave it on holiday in Venice with the godson and his little chatterbox sister, felt uncomfortable too. Verdi's Don Carlos ballet frolic put some of the Strausses' tamer stuff into the shade, including a dull Quadrille on mostly banda stuff from Macbeth and Rigoletto amongst others. I learnt one thing – that one of Stravinsky’s two ballerina-moor waltzes in Petrushka comes from Lanner's otherwise dreary Styrian Dances. The women count in the orchestra remains lamentable and inexcusable - two violinists sharing a back desk, harpist and third flute were all I saw (though that's considerably more than in the 1992 concert above).

The day was bright, so we walked from South Ken up to the meeting of the parks, around the Serpentine and via the human zoo of the Winter Wonderland to Marble Arch. J’s long expressed desire to see the latest Bond movie, Skyfall, was thwarted at the Odeon here, but we found it was on at Whiteley’s so continued the walk westwards and arrived just in time. Mendes's accomplished direction was much what I expected, the obligatory opening chase crowned by bikes on the roof of Istanbul's Covered Bazaar, but graced throughout by a Henry IV Part Two feeling of ‘I grow old’, and requiring the ever-dependable Dame Judi to be more than her previously cool M. The consummate performance in a good line up, though, surely comes from Javier Bardem, funny and hugely charismatic, out- (but not over-)acting our muscular but battered hero.