Bach - Matthäus-passion by Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) probably is the best appraised composer of all time. He was a true German composer. He lived his whole life in Germany. It is claimed that he never visited other countries. Bach started his career as young as 17-year old when he received an appointment as an organist in the city of Lüneburg. During his life Bach acted also as a music teacher and conductor.

At his days in Leipzig, Bach wrote his first large-scale vocal work Johannes-passion. The work is believed to have followed in 1727 by the Matthäus-passion. Matthäus-passion is based on the chapters 26 an 27 of the St Matthew's gospel. It is originally released for double chorus, double orchestra, two organs and solo vocalists. Bach released four years later St Mark's Passion, but unfortunately that work is largely vanished.

Passion has a special place in western music. It describes the passion of The Christ by an evangelist. There are several composed passions. As mentioned earlier, Johann Sebastian Bach's versions of St John's and St. Matthew's gospel are the best know. Worth of mentioning is also his son Carl Philipp Emmanuel, who has written passions of all the four evangelists.

Matthäus-passion has two parts: it starts from the Bethany-prophecy of the Christ and ends to the burial of the Christ. Since it is the most appreciated passion ever, it is also called as the Great Passion.

The year of the first performance of the Matthäus-passion is not full known. There are two possibilities: on the year 1727 or 1729. However, the location is known: it was at St Thomas Church in Leipzig. Matthäus-passion was performed at Vesper on Good Friday and far surpassed anything previously heard in Leipzig. The whole work lasts approximately three and half hours.

The Matthäus-passion was not very widely known until Meldelssohn's legendary reviaval of the work in 1829. After that it has been hailed as the greatest setting pf the Passion story in western music.

So, the set-up for performing the work is extremely challenging for any conductor, choir, artists and orchestra. If someone is to take the challenge, Nikolaus Harnoncourt would be the one. Mr. Harnoncourt conducted the performance in Jesuit Church on Vienna's Ignaz-Seipel-Platz on year 2000 for a twelve day period. (I guess that they have been extremly tough days for the artists). Naturally he has selected the top performers for the album: Concentus Musicus Orchestra from Vienna, child choir Wiener Sängerknaben, choir Arnold Schönberger Chor and10 solo vocalists. As mentioned earlier, the performance of the whole work takes approximately three and half hours. Unfortunately in the digital age the performance has been down-scaled to only two hours.

When Bach composed the Matthäus-passion, he clearly created it for two choirs. That was something unique at those days. Harnoncourt's performance is largely based on Bach's principles. The Arnold Schönberg Chor has been divided in two. The first section of the choir is at the left hand side and the second part is on the right. Several choral parts are based on the dialogue, where the choir symmetrically builds the musical piece typically starting from the left and continuing on the right. The Wiener Sängerknaben is in between of the choirs, kind of building the highest tones on top of the whole performance. The backbone of the performance are the choirs. Clearly.

The Concentus Musicus Orchestra's role is to support the performance. When the choirs form the backbone, the orchestra is the flesh and blood. Mr. Harnoncourt has been working with the orchestra for several years and that's really audible in the album. The performance itself is not overwhelming - and that's how it need to be. The orchestra plays accurately. At this point I would like to add the role of the organs. The role of the organs is to glue the parts of the Passion together. They clearly support the story sang by the solo vocalists. As mentioned earlier, Bach composed the work for two organs. I am not sure if there were two set of organs in this recording. Usually there's only one set of the organs in the church. The recording has been done in the front part of the church. However, the organs are at the back of the church. I would have expected, that the organs would have been mixed to the surround channels. That would have given a more realistic soundstage of a church. For some reason Teldec engineers haxe mixed the organs to the main speakers. Well... I guess that the reason might be that not all the 5.1 systems have capable enough rear speakers for organs.

The solo vocalists perform their parts extremely well. There were a clear balance in between the solo parts and the whole performance. It was very easy to spot the location of each vocalist from the sound stage. When listening to it in the sweet spot of my system, I could clearly imagine and orchestra in the middle, then three choir sections an the back of the orchestra, but definitely standing higher than the orchestra and finally the solo vocalists on front of them all. Actually, I noticed by accident that the leaflet of the recording contained a photo from the recording. The whole ensemple was set-up exactly how it was in the photo! Good work Teldec!

I've listened this recording for several times during the last seven years. It is my usual "Easter music" and the pearl of my DVD Audio collection. It contains 96kHz/24bit tracks both for 2 and 5.1 channel DVD Audio. Additionally is has Dolby Digital 5.1 for the DVD-Video. I checked the availability of the album. Unfortunately it seems that the recording is sold-out, but Teldec has planned to make a new release of year 2010. If you have a DVD Audio capable player, I strongly suggest to buy the record. On the Amazon, the pre-order price is relatively high (50$!), but you'll never know if it is your last chance to buy this masterpiece.

Info box:
Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach

Soloist	Bernarda Fink
Soloist	Elisabeth von Magnus
Soloist	Dorothea Röschmann
Soloist	Christoph Prégardien
Soloist	Michael Schade
Soloist	Oliver Widmer
Chorus	Arnold Schoenberg Chor
Conductor	Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Orchestra	Concentus musicus Wien

Released	01/03/2001
Cat Number	8573-81036-9 (DVD-Audio)
Label	Teldec
Barcode	0685738103690

Vivaldi - The Four Seasons by Janine Jansen

There are few classical music pieces which are widely identified by almost any person in the world. Possibly they are not able to point out the name of the piece or the composer of it, but certainly they can say that they've heard it somewhere. Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons certainly is one of them: A classical piece which has become a true standard. Well, the standards are great, but there are also downsides with them. Imagine some classic rock "standard", like Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. I bet you have heard it several times but.... there's only one way to play it right (and actually one band to play it right). If someone even thinks of playing it differently, that's the musician's first step towards Dante's Hell. The Four Seasons has this status. It is composed to a full-size orchestra, so a full-sized string orchestra is the only way to play it right. Naturally, the other ways are wrong.

Vivaldi released his Four Seasons on 1750. Actually, Vivaldi named the four first Opus 8 violin concertos as Le Quattro Stagioni. The concertos itself have a nature which is common to all Vivaldi's concertos. Each piece has three parts: fast - slow and ending to a fast part. The first performance of The Four Seasons took place in Amsterdam. It became an instant success across Europe! However, the modern date success of The Four Seasons emerged as late as 1950's, when the first recordings of it were released.

After 250 years of the first performance of The Four Seasons, it has become one of the most recorded classical music pieces in the world. Now the young Dutch violinist, Janine Jansen has released a new version of The Four Seasons. Unlike the previous recordings, ms Jansen has got a different approach. No... she has not made a fusion jazz version of Vivaldi's masterpiece. There's still a string orchestra.

Now, here's the difference: Vivaldi's Four Seasons is usually performed with a full-sized string orchestra. However, in this recording there's only eight musicians on stage. One might thing that this kind of set-up is a down-scaled version of Vivaldi's masterpiece, but it is not. After the first listening session I had written the following notes to my papers: fresh, new, coarse, innovative, exiting... The bottom line is clear: Janine Jansen really has found a new approach in performing The Four Seasons. For me there were two issues which were obvious: the performance made me feel like the Four Seasons would have got its first premiere, secondly it sounded more natural than any of the other Four Seasons recordings.

Jansen has a very unique playing technique and skills. The Four Season is not the easiest piece for a violinist. It either works or it does not work. In this cas it really works. In the hands of ms Jansen, Vivaldi's music just flows through the air. The performance is not as sterile as most of The Four Seasons recordings - it has a lot coarse elements in the sound, but it rocks as a moose. For me it sounded like this recording could be an unplugged version of any previous recordings.

The recording has been done in Amsterdam - the same city where The Four Seasons was performed for the first time. The recording venue was Beurs van Berlage Concert & Congreszalen. This multichannel recording has been engineered close to a perfect. The orchestra fit nicely between the front channels, but the sound stage is crystal clear, wide and open. I felt like my listening room size was doubled! It was virtually difficult to point out any music from the surround channels - but after I shut them down, I was able to notice them. This is extremely well recorded album. Once again - Decca boys and girls have done good work.

Here's my recommendations for the album:
- Listen it on a bright spring day
- Take some of your friens with you
- Served with young, dry white win (naturally from Italy, like: La Luciana Gavi, Cortese 2006)

And by the way... if you find this review useful... please tick yourself as a reader of this blog. It is nice to write these blogs - especially when you know that someone reads them!

Welcome to Fivedotone

My hobby is listening to music. It is totally useless hobby. Just sitting in the sweet spot and trying to capture the nuances, feelings and emotions. What makes it worse I have become more addicted with multichannel music. It is the format when most of the audiophiles cross their hands and call for an exorcist. Shall there be only two channels - no more - no less.

However, multichannel recordings have been available for about ten years now. That's a pretty long time. One would expect that record companies in general would have learned to make good multichannel recordings. But not. Unfortunately most of the multichannel recordings are bad. It is not about the musicians, but what happens in the recording studios. The whole listening experience is often ruined with unnatural usage of the surround channels. I can understand that it takes time for audio engineers to learn how to make good multichannel recordings. But I do not understand why ten years is not enough to learn that.

Fortunately there's some light in the tunnel. There's also exceptional multichannel recordings. I have found some SACD and DVD-A recordings as very enjoyable. This is what the Fivedotone is all about: enjoyable multichannel recordings. Just the music. No video. I hope that my blog helps other audiophiles to capture my own recommendations of good multichannel music.

Fivedotone addresses openly all the music genres, but classical music definitely has a lot of room in here. The first recording which I'm going to address is Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons by Janine Jansen. I've played the album several times now. I shall publish my more detailed comments about it in the near future.

Happy listening.
- Petri