New Bach Batch a Mixed Bag

His membership in that most exclusive of musical clubs, the Three B’s, notwithstanding, the broader popularity of Johann Sebastian Bach has come to rest chiefly on a handful of instrumental works from his enormous and varied output: the “Brandenburg” Concertos, the orchestral Suites (properly, “Ouvertures,” in the French spelling), the violin concertos and a few keyboard concertos. A far cry from the 1950s, when the Baroque craze ignited by the newfangled LP made available hundreds of previously unrecorded or little-known works.

There were times during that innocent era when nearly anything Bach committed to paper could be found on LP, including multiple listings for dozens of his 200-plus cantatas. But because of the nature of the music (vocal, usually sacred) and its requirements (soloists, chorus and an instrumental ensemble, all requiring considerable technical aplomb), this recorded plenty was never translated into live performance.

Today, with Baroque music almost exclusively the province of period practitioners and the cantatas nearing recorded completion for Teldec under Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s often eccentric, confrontational direction, alternative listings of the cantatas among the month’s new releases have become infrequent.

Thus the English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, are particularly welcome for their pairing of the mystically calm--and gripping--”Actus Tragicus,” BWV 106, with its startling dissonances, and the noble “Trauer Ode” for the Electress of Saxony, BWV 198 (Deutsche Grammophon Archiv 429 782).

Where Harnoncourt seems intent on treating Bach’s harmonies as dazzling aberrations, Gardiner, his small, flexible chorus and alert instrumentalists project Bach’s message of bliss in the afterlife with a lively naturalness of expression. The excellent quartet of soloists offers particularly winning contributions from soprano Nancy Argenta and tenor Anthony Rolfe Johnson, and the accompanying motet “O Jesu Christ mein Lebens Licht,” BWV 118b, is an attractive makeweight.

Drab competence marks the period readings in which Joshua Rifkin directs his New York-based Bach Ensemble in a program featuring the two celebrated cantatas for bass voice--”Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen” and “Ich habe genug” (L’Oiseau-Lyre 425 822).

While Bach may have had to make do with modestly gifted singers, we do not. So there’s no reason for a listener accustomed to hearing this music sung by the likes of Hermann Prey, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Hans Hotter to put up with the plain-as-pudding, labored vocalism of Rifkin’s Jan Opalach, style-conscious as it may be.

The four familiar “Ouvertures”--or Suites--for orchestra appear in a fresh guise as performed by the Boston Early Music Soloists, an accomplished band of period instrumentalists whose names are familiar from other affiliations. Their conductor here is William Malloch, L.A.’s indefatigable musical gadfly and humbug-baiter (Koch Classics 7037).

The music is delivered in fast, intensely lively, one-instrument-to-a-part readings, in accordance with the disc’s “Suites for Dancing” title. A remarkably limber and lively bunch of dancers, to be sure.

In his program notes Malloch offers convincing historical evidence for the appropriateness of the style in which he presents the music, with very fast tempos and very crisp articulation, the introductions--stately in other hands--blasting off as energetically as the fugues that follow.

Listener fatigue may set in quickly when then music is so insistently driven as it is here. But then, only a critic rushing to meet a deadline need listen to more than one of these works at a sitting.

How stimulating is Malloch’s way--he would insist that it’s simply Bach’s way--with the individual scores can be gauged by direct comparison with two additional new period recordings.

Under Roy Goodman’s direction, the Brandenburg Consort, a somewhat scrappy contingent of players from the London-based Hanover Band, fails to maintain a consistent energy level (Hyperion 66501/2, two CDs). But the Britishers’ sometimes casual and sloppy readings are at least preferable to the interpretations of a group of polished French and Spanish antiquarians under Jordi Savall’s alternatingly slick and ponderous direction (Astree 8727, two CDs).