There are fine soloists here, and Suzuki certainly paces things well, if a little quickly the balance of BIS' recording seems a little off, a rare occurrence indeed, but certain sections are a bit too quiet and others sound cluttered. Here, it sounds like a confusion, or competition, of voices and instruments the polyphonic lines are unclear and do not balance out because everything is thrown into the foreground, whereas on the printed page it is easy to see the pattern of Bach's overall musical design even if one does not read music. Ideally, with forces of any size, the opening of the Credo should sound like God coming down from the heavens, angels in tow - it is one of the few sections of the B minor Mass original to the work and not parodied from elsewhere. In light of what Suzuki has achieved in the past, this is hard to say, but this Mass in B minor really doesn't work. The band consists of just 25 players, including only eight strings. One gets the impression that Suzuki views the Mass in B minor as being the sum of the various works it parodies, fitting into the modest and intimate dimensions that characterize his outstanding realizations of Bach's cantatas - outside of the soloists, his chorus is just three to a part for sopranos, two for altos, tenors and basses. Rifkin's work is referenced in the course of Klaus Hofmann's notes for this set, mainly concerned with Bach's use of parody composition - recycling of previously made scores into new - in the Mass in B minor and other works. It was radical thinking, fresh sounding at the time, and even a little sexy in its irreverence for the grand, romantic notion built up around the B minor. With the advent of the 1983 Joshua Rifkin edition of the Mass in B minor and its corresponding recording, the idea of a 'one to a part' relationship between Bach' music and singers became the period ensemble's standard. It was commonplace until the 1980s to perform the Mass in B minor with the large forces associated with the era in which it was first heard. By the time it was performed in the nineteenth century, the gigantic vision that Bach reserved for his only large-scale mass was already somewhat familiar from similarly ambitious music composed in the meantime. A dedicated, stubborn Lutheran nevertheless, Bach could not resist the pull of the Mass text and even cannibalized some of his own Lutheran service music to fill out the liturgical structure of his Mass, much too long and complex for an ordinary service anyway. In the case of the Mass in B minor, composed throughout Bach's life from about the late 1720s but not compiled into a finished form until the end of it, Bach's intentions as such were likely that he didn't expect the work be performed at all, at least not in his lifetime. Suzuki's area of expertise is in reproducing more or less exactly Bach's performance milieu, as far as that can be determined from existing sources - Bach's 'intentions' constitute the holy grail insofar as period-specific groups are concerned.

Mass in b minor bach