Washington Bach Consort: Myths Contested: J. S. Bach and Trevor Weston
Acis
Myths Contested, Washington Bach Consort's first album in over a decade, is wonderfully rounded out by Trevor Weston's A New Song, but it's J. S. Bach's The Contest between Phoebus and Pan (BWV 201) that dominates when its forty-eight minutes towers over the other's twenty. A through-line from Bach to Weston is established by the works' shared focus on the role music plays in society, and the value of the recording is enhanced by the fact that, as the company's Artistic Director Dana Marsh contends, Bach's cantata has contemporary relevance yet has been recorded and performed less than other works by him.
Both pieces are given illuminating performances by the Washington Bach Consort, a professional choral and period-instrument ensemble founded in 1977 and led since 2018 by Marsh. Today's battle raps find their early precursor in the Bach work, which, using Greek myth as the template and an episode from Ovid's Metamorphoses as the springboard, pits Pan (bass-baritone Ian Pomeranz) against Phoebus Apollo (bass-baritone Paul Max Tipton) in a singing contest. Like professional boxers, both have advocates in their corners, King Midas (tenor Patrick Kilbride) for Pan and the mountain god Tmolus (tenor Jacob Perry, Jr.) for Phoebus. Two other characters, Mercurius (alto Sarah Davis Issaelkhoury) and Momus (soprano Sherezade Panthaki), contribute additional commentary. Hardly an impartial judge, Midas judges the contest and, much to the shock of the others, deems Pan the victor.
In the booklet packaged with the sixty-eight-minute release, commentaries by Marsh, Daniel R. Melamad, and Weston provide background detail and food for thought. Marsh, for example, ponders Bach's rhetorical aims and, citing the perhaps slightly overwrought character of Phoebus's aria, questions whether satire plays a part in the material. Melamad describes Pan's aria as a “rustic jig … whose text is about dancing and leaping” and Phoebus's a “slow expression of longing and desire.” He further contends that the text and music of the work “engage a debate over the merits of rustic, ‘natural' music and more sophisticated art.” Weston's statement that his work embodies “a discussion of the differing societal expectations we have for new art” is similarly helpful.
The Contest between Phoebus and Pan captivates from start to finish, advancing as it does from a choral aria intro through alternating arias (six) and recitatives (seven) before resolving with a choral aria outro (with two singers added, the framing parts involve eight). Each of the main characters sings an aria, with those sung by the combatants naturally contrasting markedly in tone and sung in major (Pan) and minor (Phoebus) keys; fittingly, the arias delivered by their advocates are likewise in major and minor. Enhancing the piece, Bach worked diverse rhythmic and instrumental combinations into the fifteen-part cantata.
The glorious, trumpets-accented music in the regal intro sets a dazzling stage. The harpsichord-supported exchanges in the recitatives prove as riveting as the arias, with the soaring opening expression by Panthaki (Momus) establishing a dauntingly high bar for those after. The consort's strings and woodwinds add greatly to the aria performances; the solemn largo by Tipton (Phoebus), for instance, is beautifully enriched by oboe d'amore and flute flourishes, as well as strings and harpsichord. By comparison, the radiant reply by Pomeranz (Pan) is buoyed more by the latter instruments than woodwinds. Perry, Jr. (Tmolus) and Kilbride (Midas) make their distinguished presences felt with resonant turns, as does Issaelkhoury (Mercurius) in her flutes-enhanced solo.
While Weston's A New Song, commissioned by Washington Bach Consort in 2019 and premiered three years later, also explores questions of musical value, it doesn't do so using a singing competition as a vehicle; instead, issues relating to time, emotion, and musical form are explored using three singers as conduits. While the composer concedes some aspects of the work could be considered Bach-like (e.g., the dance rhythms in its third movement “Now Seems Old”), A New Song, true to its title, is a work that's clearly in Weston's voice yet also reflects what he's absorbed from Bach. Panthaki, Issaelkhoury, and Perry, Jr. handle solo duties in the work's eight parts, in places singing together and in others their magnificent voice heard apart. From the mellifluous “Listen,” with its desire for new “luminous sounds,” on through the haunting “Time” and rapturous “Hear Life,” A New Song shows itself to be a worthy companion to the Bach cantata. Coupling old with new, as the Washington Bach Consort has so deftly done here, makes for a splendid recording that invites repeat visits.November 2023