Choral Award John Butt
JS Bach
Cantatas BWV 32 ‘Liebster Jesu’, 82 ‘Ich habe genug’, & 106 ‘Actus tragicus’ Joanne Lunn (soprano), Matthew Brook (bass) et al; Dunedin Consort/john Butt Linn Records CKD672
This glorious recording of three Bach cantatas may have won the Choral Award but, explains John Butt, music director of the Dunedin Consort, it was two individual voices that initially inspired its creation. ‘We wanted to profile the two main soloists, Joanne Lunn and Matthew Brook, in repertoire that we’d tried out with them before,’ he says. ‘These seemed the ideal cantatas to do that and, in BWV 32, to bring them together too.’
The three cantatas share a theme of the acceptance of death – though, as Butt points out, ‘It’s actually quite difficult to avoid that subject in Bach’s cantatas’ – and, with their comparatively small number of performers, were also an ideal match for the timing of the recording itself. ‘It wasn’t as if we had some sort of overweening ambition to do some sort of “deathly essay” during the pandemic!’ he says. ‘It was more that the limitations and possibilities pushed us in that direction. Because it happened just before the lockdown at the end of 2020 took place, everything was quite limited in terms of travel, spacing and so on.’
Butt and the Dunedin Consort’s recordings have regularly earned praise for their immaculate scholarship but, he insists, this doesn’t just mean poring with a pencil over facsimiles of original manuscripts for days on end. ‘While part of the scholarship does involve studying the original performing parts and scholarly editions, and considering the options, there’s also critically informed scholarship which is all about looking at how atmosphere is created, how consciousness is manipulated during the course of a performance and how the average listener might respond to the way the music works. That all counts as part of my research.’ Jeremy Pound