Knocked off course by Bach’s taxing music

Les Arts Florissants Wigmore Hall

Some vocal groups spread their net wide; Les Arts Florissants make a virtue of focus. Under Paul Agnew, their associate musical director, they’ve dedicated themselves to the secular

songs by just one composer, Claudio Monteverdi, advancing through the eight books year by year. The results have been sublime.

The trouble with setting the bar so high is that when they slip under it, even by an inch or two, it can be a keen disappointment. That was my experience at the Wigmore Hall.

Moving a million miles away from Monteverdi and the French Baroque music, the group offered a hugely taxing programme of all four motets by JS Bach, one more that could well be by him, plus three other pieces by Bach’s predecessor at the church in Leipzig where he worked, and assorted Bach family members.

So, a different language, a different musical style, and a different climate of feeling, often anguished and penitential in tone, sometimes breaking through to joy at the thought of salvation. One thing this music has in common with Monteverdi’s is a

tendency to highlight the important words, and the eight singers seized on these moments. In Jesu, meine Freude

(Jesus my Joy) the text warns of the “thunder and lightning” of the sinful world, and in German those words really do crack and spit.

There were plenty of vivid moments like this that reminded us what this group is truly capable of. But there were a few of strain and wobbly intonation too, and bumpy passages where one voice projected through the overall sound like an uneven tooth. The problem lay in the peculiar nature of Bach’s music, which at times hardly seems like vocal music at all. Instead of long melodies it’s full of scurrying patterns, more apt for a violin or cello than a voice. Some groups can take this in their stride; these singers seemed discomfited by it.