John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Cantata Pilgrimage will keep him more than fully occupied throughout the 250th anniversary year. The idea of taking the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists and an ever-changing roster of soloists on perpetual tour through the sacred buildings of Europe, performing all of Bach's cantatas on the dates in the church calendar for which they were written, will turn out to be either a triumph or folie de grandeur . Aldeburgh got three of the concerts this week, two of them at Long Melford near Sudbury, the final one, on Tuesday afternoon, at Blythburgh Church, which has long been one of the festival's most precious and inspiring venues.
Inspired, though, was something that these performances were not. The nine surviving Pentecost cantatas were the focus of this particular triptych; the final concert included the two written in 1724 and 1725 for Whit Tuesday, Nos 184 and 175, interleaved with the Third Brandenburg Concerto and the unaccompanied motet Jesu Meine Freude. Gardiner's way with this music is familiar enough now - urgent, sometimes driven, often moulded in a self-consciously expressive way. It's an approach that can seem over-wrought, but, whatever the misgivings, there is usually a real buzz about his concerts and real technical finesse in their execution.
That was what was so surprising about these performances: the uncertainty of some of the contributions from the normally so dependable Monteverdi Choir, the ragged edges and moments of sour tuning in the orchestral playing, the sheer lack of any sense of occasion, despite the fact that, as for all the pilgrimage concerts, every ticket had been sold weeks in advance. Some of the solo singing was very fine, especially from the tenor Christoph Genz and alto Claudia Schubert, and there were moments when everything did come together and the focus sharpened. But for someone of Gardiner's stature and musicianship the overall standard really wasn't good enough. Rehearsing, performing and recording three programmes in three days seemed to have taken a bigger toll than he envisaged.
