Bach’s Colossus

Bach’s Mass in B Minor begins with a majestic howl of pain—four adagio bars that combine formal grandeur with writhing interior lines, as if figures in a cathedral frieze of the Last Judgment were coming to life. The text is “Kyrie eleison,” or “Lord, have mercy,” and the distribution of the words in the chorus suggests the flailing of a desperate crowd. Half the sopranos sing “Kyrie, Kyrie, eleison, eleison,” the other half sing “Kyrie, eleison, eleison, eleison”; the altos sing “Kyrie, eleison, Kyrie, eleison,” the tenors and basses “Kyrie, Kyrie, Kyrie, eleison.” Only the first and last chords in the sequence are solid triads, the rest tinged by dissonance to one degree or another. The orchestration is a touch grotesque, with the first violins given a shrill D two octaves above middle C. The bass line retreats toward the treble, creating further instability. After a moment of repose on F-sharp major, an immense fugue on “Kyrie eleison” unfolds, in two gradually cresting and subsiding waves—ten minutes of sublime churn.

A new recording of the B-Minor Mass by the French ensemble Pygmalion, under the direction of Raphaël Pichon, delivers that four-bar exordium with maximum force. The weight of the sound—incorporating five vocal soloists, thirty choristers, and thirty-three instrumentalists—harks back to lumbering mid-twentieth-century accounts by Otto Klemperer and Hermann Scherchen, before the original-instrument movement dictated light textures and fleet tempos. Yet period style still adheres, the timbres pungent rather than plush. Urgency animates each component of the whole, whether it’s the punchy “K”s in the male voices or the penetrating chants of “eleison” in the sopranos. A sharp intake of breath before the first chord heightens the impact. The plea for mercy is dire: arms are held up to ward off a blow.

Pichon, a former countertenor, founded Pygmalion in 2006, when he was still a student at the Paris Conservatory. The group began issuing recordings in 2008, first on the Alpha label and then on Harmonia Mundi. One early project was to document Bach’s “Missae Breves,” or short masses, among which is the Missa 1733, the source of the Kyrie and the Gloria sections of the B-Minor Mass. (Bach completed the full version of the Mass in 1749, at the end of his life; he never heard it whole.) From the start, Pygmalion’s musicians stood out, not so much for their pristine intonation and liquid legato—today’s early-music ensembles have transcended the scrawniness of yore—as for their vibrant phrasing, their bold colors, their air of spontaneous excitement. Lately, they’ve been tackling pinnacles of the sacred repertory: Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Mozart’s Requiem, and now the complete B-Minor Mass.

Pygmalion’s recording of the Mass has many stretches of sonic splendor, which bloom in the acoustic of the Cathédrale Notre-Dame-du-Liban, in Paris, where Harmonia Mundi’s sessions took place. Purists may feel that Pichon and company have gone overboard, but, given that the Kyrie and the Gloria were intended for the glittering Dresden court, a bit of opulence seems apt. If the “Kyrie eleison” casts a chilly shadow, the closing movements of the various sections erupt with joyful noise, all skirling trumpets and banging drums. “Cum Sancto Spiritu” has a dancing drive; “Et expecto” is a virtual stampede; and “Dona nobis pacem” builds to sonorities so monumental that they threaten to put Bruckner out of business. (Play it loud.)

At the same time, this B-Minor Mass is notable for its intimacy, its confiding humanity. It’s not one of those self-serious endeavors in which everyone genuflects before God’s chosen composer. In “Laudamus te,” Sophie Gent, Pygmalion’s concertmaster, delivers her violin solos with an almost folkish twang, as if sauntering around while she plays. The flutist Georgia Browne brings conversational warmth to “Domine Deus,” with Thibaut Roussel strumming sympathetically on the theorbo. Alongside the radiant climaxes, the chorus achieves spells of shivering inwardness. In the nebula of chords that ushers in “Et expecto,” the prospect of the resurrection of the dead engenders an awed pianissimo on the word “mortuorum.”

As I followed along with the 2010 Bärenreiter edition of the score, I noticed how the musicians heed the dynamic and tempo markings that appear in the so-called Dresden parts—materials that Bach prepared for a prospective Dresden performance of the Kyrie and Gloria. The glacial pace of the “Kyrie eleison” introduction, for example, is justified by the indication “molto adagio”—“very slow”—in the cello part. (For whatever reason, Bach wrote only “adagio” elsewhere.) In “Laudamus te,” Gent syncopates the reprise of her opening line with a Lombard rhythm, in which a quick short note precedes a longer one; this, too, can be found in the Dresden parts. Such discrepancies in Bach’s manuscripts show that no definitive version of the Mass exists and that modern performers are free to follow their intuition.

Pygmalion’s effort, thrilling as it is, falls short of perfection, as every recording must. The vocal soloists are impeccable, yet only the mezzo-soprano Lucile Richardot arrives at a really personal approach, her haunted, aching “Agnus Dei” setting the stage for the “Dona nobis pacem.” An oddly aggressive “Crucifixus” lacks mystery. The fast tempos verge on the hectic. Among latter-day accounts of the Mass, I’ll continue to revisit the devotional precision of the Bach Collegium Japan, the austere blendedness of the Netherlands Bach Society, and the chiaroscuro glow of the Collegium Vocale Gent. I also treasure the effusive pomp of Karl Richter, who led the first live performance of the Mass I heard, in 1978. But Pygmalion’s rendition, with its passionate embrace of human extremes, belongs among the greatest.

At the onset of this dark American summer, I’ve gone back and forth between Bach’s colossus and a contemporary creation of radically different character: Timothy McCormack’s hour-long piano work “mine but for its sublimation,” which has been recorded by Jack Yarbrough and released on Another Timbre. According to the composer’s program notes, the piece is “about letting go; othering; finding presence through evaporation. Obliteration.” The music is, for the most part, quiet and slow, often hovering at the edge of silence. Yet it has a cumulative power that left me a little dazed the first time I listened.

McCormack, who uses the pronoun “they,” was born in 1984, in Cleveland; studied at Oberlin, the University of Huddersfield, and Harvard; and is now based in San Diego. At first, their music tended toward density and frenzy, echoing the maximalist aesthetics of Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough, and Chaya Czernowin, one of McCormack’s teachers. In recent years, they have adopted a sparser, if not simpler, style. The gently rocking, softly cryptic chords that inaugurate “mine but for its sublimation” bring Morton Feldman to mind, yet that impression dissipates as the soundscape grows more variegated and unpredictable: bell-like single tones, rumbling clusters, plinks and thumps from inside the piano, showers of harmonics produced by deploying e-bows, or electric bows, to vibrate the instrument’s strings without touching them. By the end, Yarbrough’s piano seems less a physical machine than a zone of resonance. “Presence through evaporation,” indeed.

About nineteen minutes in, after a meditative string of A-flats, a halting procession of some two hundred and seventy-five chords begins—permutations of eight basic types, containing up to twelve notes. It is opaque music, numbing at times, yet the ear soon picks out patterns. A rising line of B, D-flat, and E-flat makes itself felt, and before long those notes are ringing out in a short-long pattern, like a languid Lombard rhythm. The harmonies disperse and gravitate toward tonal nodes, until, suddenly, stunningly, pure E-flat major materializes. I thought of the “Et expecto” from the B-Minor Mass, which wanders from D major to the verge of oblivion. Here, something like the opposite happens, though only for a moment. The tonal mirage vanishes. Perhaps the proximity of the Mass affected my thinking, but I heard that E-flat chord as a spiritual event. It was as if no such chord had existed before or would exist again. ♦