Choral & Song

CPE Bach • JS Bach

JS Bach: Magnificat, BWV 243*; CPE Bach: Magnificat, Wq. 215

Miriam Feuersinger, *Anja Scherg (soprano), Marie Henriette Reinhold (alto), Patrick Grahl (tenor), Markus Eiche (bass); Gaechinger Cantorey/Hans-Christoph Rademann

Accentus ACC30563 62:52 mins

Composed in 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach’s Magnificat was his first major work as newly appointed Cantor of St Thomas, Leipzig. Twenty-seven years later, in an unsuccessful bid to succeed to the post, his second surviving son Carl Philipp Emanuel presented his own version. The two settings make for a fascinating comparison. Where JS opens with an ornate dance of stately jubilation, CPE dashes into action like the arrival of some Queen of Sheba. And while JS proceeds with a sequence of brief arias and choruses, CPE is less contrapuntal, more nervous and mannerist in style, with abrupt pauses or changes of dynamics, though culminating in an uncharacteristically sustained fugue as if in respectful tribute to his father.

Of these two performances by the Stuttgart-based Gaechinger Cantorey, the CPE Bach comes over more vividly, with sharply articulated detail under the energetic direction Hans-Christoph Rademann. Something of the contrapuntal intricacy, and the wonted brightness of the three trumpets, in the JS Bach is lost in the slightly recessed acoustic of the Forum am Schlosspark Ludwigsburg (not some Ludwig of Bavaria folly but