Southwell Festival, Notts

Festival Baroque Voices and Soloists: Bach’s Mass in B Minor

August 22 2018

Southwell Minster

5*****

Review: William Ruff

@ReviewsGate

An Exceptional B Minor Mass from Southwell

Something happened in the nave of Southwell Minster on the opening night of this year's Festival which should have been impossible.  To start at the end: festivals may occasionally conclude with standing ovations but they rarely start with one.  But try keeping the Minster audience on their seats after such a stunning performance of Bach's B Minor Mass by the Festival Baroque Soloists and Voices.  But what of the impossibilities which led to this?  Marcus Farnsworth's direction was as invisible as it was masterly.  The more one looked the more one couldn't see how he was doing it.  The only explanation was that in rehearsal he had turned his outstanding vocal and instrumental forces into an intuitive chamber ensemble.

The platform layout emphasised this approach, with instruments on one side facing vocalists on the other, able to see each other and perfectly at one in matters of phrasing, balance and timbre.  Amongst the most moving aspects of the performance were the duets for two solo voices or for voice and solo instrument as individual musical talents melted into a profoundly spiritual experience infinitely greater than the sum of its parts.

Never was there any sense of labouring towards a pinnacle: these musicians had already arrived at the summit before a note was sounded. And there they remained, Bach's often impossibly difficult music freely flowing in their veins.   There was a crystal clarity of texture throughout, and the sheer volume of sound produced by only ten singers was as remarkable as the fact that each had to move seamlessly from immersion in choral grandeur to the intimacy of the jewel-like arias.

Other highlights?  The bright, buoyant opening of the Gloria; the way that musical weight was imparted to the words in phrases like in terra pax; the chiaroscuro effects of light and darkness as the Crucifixus gave way to the triumphant Et resurrexit; the explosive Amen at the end of the Credo; the glorious Osannas capping the Sanctus and Benedictus.

After such a sequence of musical and spiritual profundities it's not surprising that the audience rose so spontaneously to their feet at the end.  If Marcus Farnsworth and his like-minded musicians had set out to achieve the impossible, no one present in the Minster on Wednesday was in any doubt that they had succeeded.

Conductor: Marcus Farnsworth

Southwell Festival Baroque Soloists and Voices, all solos sung by members of the choir