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The Essential Bach 2/5: Mass in B Minor (2009)

Artists: Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Ruth Holton, Matthias Rexroth, Christoph Genz, Klaus Mertens...

Conductor: Georg Christoph Biller | Recording Date: July 2008 | Place of recording: Thomaskirche, Leipzig

"Slow, thumpy, out-of-tune, the Gewandhausorchester could hardly play with less sense of Baroque performance practices. Turn off the sound and watch the concertmaster's bow; the man has no sense of phrasing. The horn sounds like an Italian ambulance siren, but that's glorious compared to the trumpets, those kazoo-shaped miniature Bach trumpets used because modern trumpeters can't cover the parts written for baroque trumpets. These little beasties are shrill and out of tune nearly every time they enter. And the bassoons! I could produce better tone with a set of rubber bands stretched to various tensions. Conductor Georg Christoph Biller sets such lumbering tempi throughout - slower than the growth of the GDP under the communist regime of East Germany - that the soloists have trouble singing through phrase. One soloist, alto Matthias Rexroth, must have been having a bad hair day; his countertnor sounds forced and his tuning problems are horrendous. The Thomanerchor Leipzig, a sea of boys and near-men, is way too big to be expressive of anything but earnest bombast. It's hard to imagine a less artful performance...

...and yet! and yet! It's awfully hard not to be thrilled by the sight of all those boys singing their hearts out, the ten and twelve year olds swelling with pride, the tenors determined to sound mature, the faces of the basses splotched with acne and self-consciousness, just as they must and should be at that age. Then there are the faces of the orchestra members, most of them in their fifties and older, survivors and likely thrivers during the communist decades, any number of them perhaps former CP members. This is Leipzig, remember. Bach's homeland was part of East Germany, yet Bach's profoundly religious music was never suppressed. And the faces of the audience, packed to the buttresses of the Thomaskirche, the very church where Bach directed the musical studies of the choir boys and performed his cantatas to considerably less packed congregations. There's the thrill, to see all these people - musicians and listeners - rapt in adoration of the closest thing to man-made-God, the divine Johann Sebastian Bach. That's the worship you'll see and hear on this DVD, the powerful love of music that has survived both Communism and capitalism, and the collapse of European Christianity into indifference. It's exciting to see such commitment, even if the performance is amateurish. "

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I detected a problem on my DVD reader, the principal one, which might have resulted in errors on the last DVDs, probably since Ascanio in Alba, I think, which explains why I posted less recently. So if some people have watched actually these works, can they confirm their perfect status, or say what problem they've experienced. Thanks in advance.

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