After being knighted by the Queen of England, after having been ordained Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, after winning more Gramophone Awards than anyone else, there are few challenges left to a musician. But endeavoring to perform the entirety of Bach’s nearly 200 church cantatas—all in just one year—is an audacious next step. This is what Sir John Eliot Gardiner did in 2000. Fortunately for those not present to witness it, the quixotic project was painstakingly documented.
In late December, ten years after the feat, Soli Deo Gloria (via Naxos Records) released the final albums of a beautiful 27-disc series, and what conductor and project director Gardiner aptly dubs his “Pilgrimage.” For this week’s Chicago Symphony guest-conducting appearances, Sir John has left his Bach scores back home in England, but there is no mistaking that the expedition continues to affect every aspect of the early-music expert’s life.
“It’s a bit like playing a computer game. Suddenly you get a whole lot of extra bogies and hazards that you’ve got to deal with,” Gardiner tells us by phone from Italy. He explains that no amount of planning can account for the sicknesses, contract kerfuffles and financial squeezes inevitable with such a mammoth project. The way the 67-year-old cheerfully speaks of the many difficulties threatening to derail the Bach Cantata Pilgrimage, it is evident that the conductor continues to be in awe that it was ever completed. He humbly credits the artistry and sheer tenacity of his Monteverdi Choir (a group he founded in 1964) and the English Baroque Soloists (a period-instrument orchestra he founded in 1977). Performing all of Bach’s extant church cantatas mandated a killer weekly itinerary: a preliminary concert Saturday, a performance Sunday, a return flight from the performance city (initially the German towns where Bach lived and worked) Monday, and rehearsals for the next gig Tuesday through Friday.
Bach himself was on a similarly tight deadline of near-weekly composition and performances. “But then, it was him, not me!” Gardiner exclaims with a chuckle.
Budgets restricted Gardiner to a single rehearsal inside each performance venue—which made recording a constantly mutating, harrowing endeavor. The variation in size and acoustics of each church had to be wrangled by Dutch recording group Polyhymnia, as well as Sir John’s wife, producer Isabella de Sabata. The granddaughter of Italian maestro Victor de Sabata, she would be the only “pilgrim” to make the entire 12-month journey apart from her husband. “It was a hell of a headache for my wife,” Gardiner says with pride, “She’s done a damn good job.”
Certainly an accurate assessment, if an understatement, of this undertaking. The curious should dive in with the series’ first CD, which includes one of the highlights of the entire set, “O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort” (BWV 20). The transformative execution of Bach’s setting of the Last Judgment finds the composer at his most startlingly grave and operatic. For his Thursday and Saturday performances at Symphony Center, however, Sir John steers his baton into the 20th century. Audiences are treated to the opportunity of witnessing the versatile conductor navigating one of the most virtuosic pieces in the orchestral repertoire, Béla Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra.” The work is like a massive concerto grosso, with each section of the orchestra featured in thrilling flourishes throughout, in a kind of radical, virtuosic democracy. But it’s a molehill compared to Bach’s Everest. We ask Gardiner if he is slating any future enterprises on the scale of the cantata pilgrimage. Gardiner interrupts, “There’s nothing along these lines, I promise you!”
- Doyle Armbrust
published in Time Out Chicago on January 19th, 2011