The penultimate instalment of this year's offerings in the Orchestra of St Cecilia's marathon traversal of Bach's church cantatas took place at St Ann's, Dawson Street, on Sunday afternoon.
Cantatas 18, 106, 126, 181...........................................................Bach
The programme consisted of four cantatas, three of them written for Sexagesima Sunday, the other, and most familiar, No. 106 Actus tragicus, probably written for a funeral in 1707 or 1708, some 15 years before Bach was to enter the stage of his career which prompted the bulk of his cantata writing.
The range and diversity of Bach's invention remains a matter of wonder.
The uniquely touching textural effect of the pairs of recorders and violas da gamba at the opening of the Actus tragicus is well known. The earthily dense writing for four violas in Cantata 18, Gleichwie der Regen und Schnee vom Himmel fällt (For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven) is less well-celebrated but similarly striking.
Blánaid Murphy, the most frequently heard conductor in this series, is not the most imaginative of interpreters. She sets sensible speeds, but her beat tends towards rigidity, and the shading of dynamics is not one of her strengths.
Canzona, one of many choirs under her care, showed her strengths as a choral trainer - it is firm of line and internally well-balanced.
The Orchestra of St Cecilia revealed solid continuo playing, but was elsewhere extremely variable. The account of Actus tragicus, was secure, but among the fluctuations which followed were, in Cantata 18, some of the severest intonational problems I've heard from a professional group in quite some time.
Among the soloists, mezzo soprano Alison Browner was her familiarly purposeful self. Tenor John Elwes sometimes strains a bit, as if he's trying to project to the back row of a venue much larger than St Ann's. But his musical responses are imaginative, his sense of involvement complete. Bass Philip O'Reilly explored different extremes, moving from imperious command, to apparent loss of pitch control, occasioned, perhaps, by the vagaries of the orchestra.
Soprano Emma Murphy, a singer new to me, showed a voice that should take her far in Bach if she can remove a slight fuzziness of gestural focus and articulate her words with greater clarity.
