Beloved & Beautiful: Meine Freundin, du bist schön

Approfondimenti

Beloved & Beautiful: Meine Freundin, du bist schön (Girlfriend, you are beautiful) sounds like a title for an album of pop songs, but it's something different and original: a collection of German Baroque cantatas setting passages from the Song of Songs (or, in the case of J.S. Bach's Cantata No. 196, a related text). Dutch conductor Jos van Veldhoven and his Netherlands Bach Society have released a strong series of rather intimate Baroque sacred music recordings, and this may be the best yet. What makes the program so compelling is that the Song of Songs texts, romantic and even sexual in nature, force the composers into intense, often dialogic structures in the absence of the influence of the Italian operatic style that influenced the mature J.S. Bach; the Bach cantata heard here dates from 1709, and the rest of the music is earlier than that, with that work preceded by composers who taught or influenced J.S. Bach. Think of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas for an idea of how this music generates passion in the seventeenth century style. The high point of the whole thing may be the massive final chaconne -- some 60 variations! -- of the Johann Christoph Bach piece (he was an uncle of J.S. Bach) that gives the album its title. "My beloved is mine, and I am his; he feeds among the roses and is faithful to me," runs the text. "His left arm lies beneath my head, and his right arm encourages me. He refreshes me with flowers, and comforts me with apples. My beloved is mine, and I am his, for I am sick with love." Intriguing enough, and the biblical text is adorned with a kind of running secular gloss unlike anything else in the Baroque literature. The program goes back as far as Schütz, who sets this kind of text with antiphonal passages that seem to mount in intensity in a distinctive way. By the time J.S. Bach wrote his Cantata No. 140 he had more modern ways of expressing such ideas, but the collision between the older styles and the hot subject matter has a flavor all its own. The Netherlands Bach Society performers sing one voice per part, often an undesirable solution but appropriate enough in his music, where it creates a madrigal-like atmosphere. The SACD church sound (sampled on a good conventional stereo) produces an extremely unusual effect of intimacy; the quiet male singers take the music at an almost conversational level, and even though you can lose them in the strings, the sound is striking. The Song of Songs is thought to have been an allegory for God's love, but who knows? The idea of collecting Baroque works inspired by it both brings out rarely heard pieces and holds them together in a fascinating way. Highly recommended.
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