AUTHENTIC BACH--FOR NOW

Not long ago, all it took for a conductor to be considered a Baroque period stylist was to employ a harpsichord continuo. Later, his bona fides were confirmed by adding viola da gamba and recorder (even if cello and transverse flute were the historically justified instruments). And one began to hear the little keyed trumpet (a modern artifact, to be sure), intended to simulate the sound of the valveless clarino of Bach’s era.

As we moved toward the 1970s, such period equipage as gut strings, single-keyed flutes, valveless trumpets and horns, lowered pitch, ad infinitum became not only performance requirements but vitalizing procedures that brought us closer to the music rather than antiquarian noodling that distanced us from it.

The conductors (all British, it should be noted) in the forefront of the current phase of the period performance movement--John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood and Trevor Pinnock--are being challenged by a new, less entertainment-minded contingent of British musicologist-conductors: Andrew Parrott, Paul Hillier and Charles Medlam.

In his recording of Bach’s mighty Mass in B minor (Angel/EMI DSB-39750), Parrott is inspired by the recent edition of American conductor/musicologist Joshua Rifkin, which holds that Bach wanted not a chorus, as we understand the term, but a single voice per line.

Thus, we can get as many as a dozen singers for the grandest of Bach’s choral outpourings, but more usually five to seven, these being also the aria soloists.

If Rifkin in his recording (on the Nonesuch label) left more than a few listeners unconvinced, at least his version was not saddled, as Parrott’s is, with hooty boy singers for three of the crucial solo parts. Nor did Rifkin demand that his adult solo sopranos imitate the vibratoless innocence of their boy colleagues.

While Parrott leads with gusto and has at his disposal the Taverner Consort, some of the world’s most accomplished period instrumentalists, his preoccupation with the bland, “white” sound of the singers is off-putting in the extreme.

In a new recording of Bach’s six choral motets (Angel/EMI DFO-38241), conductor Paul Hillier uses strictly male forces--the Hannover Boys Choir and a pair each of adult altos (we no longer call them countertenors), tenors and basses. The richly varied continuo is provided by members of Charles Medlam’s London Baroque ensemble.

Obviously, the sound of the boys dominates here as well. But it is appropriate to such pristine, contemplative music.

Perhaps it isn’t precisely the way the composer did it, but John Eliot Gardiner’s rousing recorded edition of Bach’s Magnificat in D (Philips 411 458, standard vinyl and compact disc) achieves the balance of scholarship and showmanship required to reach today’s sophisticated audience for Baroque music.

Gardiner uses period instruments--brilliantly played by the English Baroque Soloists--the adult Monteverdi Chorus and adult vocal soloists, with particularly distinguished work among the latter from soprano Emma Kirkby and tenor Anthony Rolfe-Johnson.

Philips pairs the Magnificat with Bach’s cantata, “Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen”--a virtuoso romp for soprano (Kirkby) and trumpet soloist (the phenomenal Crispian Steele-Perkins).

An older, more conservative style of period performance is heard in a worthwhile reissue of a 1968 recording of Handel’s so-called “Brockes Passion,” after Heinrich Brockes, who wrote the German-language libretto.

This 2 1/2-hour composition, written between 1716 and 1719, gives little hint of the pomp and ornateness of the English oratorios Handel was to produce, nor does it provide a foretaste of the intense drama of the Bach Passions.

The “Brockes Passion” is, rather, backward-looking in style and effect, to the homely, contemplative oratorios of his North German predecessors. But it is also a storehouse of magnificent melody, some of it recast later for such masterpieces as “Giulio Cesare” and “Deborah.”

The recorded performance (Deutsche Grammophon 413 922, three standard discs) is led by pioneering Swiss scholar August Wenzinger. The strings of his period-instrument orchestra, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, employ too much vibrato but are otherwise excellent. The chorus is the all-male Regensburg Cathedral Choir and the solo vocal contingent features such paragons of Baroque style, as it was understood during the 1960s, as soprano Maria Stader, tenor Ernst Haefliger and bass Theo Adam.

An unusual record of Baroque music features Lukas Foss’ briefly notorious “Baroque Variations” of 1967 in which the eternal bad boy “treated” some familiar pieces by J. S. Bach, Domenico Scarlatti and Handel.

Foss called his Variations “dreams” of those pieces, almost entirely fashioned with the Baroque composers’ original notes. That is, the music is played “straight” for long stretches, then with portions of it “inaudible but not omitted.” Mind you, the music is being played, but you cannot hear it. Got that?

This lighthearted nonsense (Foss had to have been kidding, right?) is performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic under the decomposer’s direction (Nonesuch 71416, digitally remastered).

Turn the record over and you’ll hear the genuine sources of the Foss Variations--as proof of their indestructibility--played, magnificently, on period instruments by organist John Finney, violinist Sergiu Luca, harpsichordist John Gibbons and an ensemble conducted by Joshua Rifkin.