Classical music: Baroque on a roll

By KENNETH WALTON
Published on Thursday 23 February 2012 00:00

Bach is a technical challenge even for those schooled in European music traditions, so it’s to Masaaki Suzuki’s credit that the Bach Collegium Japan is such a great success, finds Kenneth Walton

BACK in 1991, the idea of founding an instrumental ensemble and choir that specialised in authentic performance of Baroque music would hardly have been considered a pioneering initiative. After all, the likes of Christopher Hogwood’s Academy of Ancient Music, John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, or such illustrious European models as Philippe Herreweghe’s Collegium Vocale Ghent and his Parisian ensemble La Chappelle Royale – all products of the 1960s and 70s – were by then mature period ensembles with progressively global reputations.

The difference was that this new ensemble was being put together in a part of the world where the music of Bach and his mainstream European Baroque contemporaries was about as relevant and familiar as Shomyo Buddhist chant is to us. For this was the group now internationally known as the Bach Collegium Japan, set up 21 years ago by the Japanese organist and harpsichordist Masaaki Suzuki in a country where only 3 per cent of the population is Christian, and where a Bach Cantata would, to the wider Japanese masses, have been about as spiritually relevant as an Irish limerick set to music.

But Suzuki saw a future in the idea, even although the original impetus was a purely practical response to a request to provide music at the opening of a new concert hall in Osaka in 1990. He had just returned from studying in the Netherlands – the hotbed of European early music scholarship – and as well as pursuing a career as a soloist performing mainly Bach, was now teaching in his home town of Kobe.

“I put together several student ensembles for the hall opening and together we developed a full concert programme,” he says. By 1992 the official Bach Collegium Japan (BCJ) was formed and giving regular performances of Bach’s cantatas. In 1995, it was signed up by the Swedish BIS record label, from which a comprehensive series of Bach recordings emerged to massive critical acclaim. The rest, as they say, is history, and the BCJ is now as lauded in Europe and America as it is in Asia, and is a living legend on its Japanese home turf.

Until now, its only Scottish presence has been at the Edinburgh International Festival, where it took part in the 2009 Bach Cantata series at Greyfriars Church, as well as giving a memorable concert performance of Handel’s Rinaldo at the Usher Hall. Next week, however, Suzuki and his musicians make an exclusive UK appearance in Perth, with a three-concert weekend residency featuring music by Bach and his contemporaries, with a single Bach cantata as the focal point each night, sung by the English soprano Joanne Lunn.

The opening programme on Friday 2 March includes Bach’s buoyant Double Violin Concerto and a Handel organ concerto performed by Suzuki’s son Masato. Saturday’s concert, following an afternoon discussion between Suzuki and Glasgow University professor (and fellow Bach Scholar) John Butt, includes a Vivaldi Bassoon Concerto. Suzuki’s own virtuosity as a harpsichordist comes under the spotlight on Sunday 4 March in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No 5.

Nowadays, finding players up to par with Baroque performance in Japan is not the problem it once was. And for this particular series of concerts, Suzuki has chosen his players from a pool of largely Japanese musicians now based in Europe. But when he started the BCJ it was never that easy.

The biggest problem was finding singers, he says. “Bach’s name was as famous in Japan as it was elsewhere, but at that time it was not so usual to find professional ensembles willing to take up the Bach repertory, especially the vocal works where the German text was a particular barrier.

“Also, in Japan we had no choir tradition, so it was very difficult to assemble even amateur choirs that might be able to sing a classic like Bach’s B Minor Mass. Even in the conservatories the good young singers wanted to be opera singers; the challenge for me was to catch them young and encourage them to sing Bach, which is technically much more difficult than the operatic repertory.”

Suzuki’s appointment in 1991 as a professor at the national conservatory at Tokyo University was perfect timing, bringing him into direct contact with the right people at the right time in their development. His influence was immediate.

“It took a long time to train them in a style that suited Bach, getting them to sing together with perfect clarity and precision.” As a result of his success, Suzuki found that in the early years of the BCJ he had a steady enough turnover of singers to allow the vocal ensemble to develop and refine the definitive sound it can now call its own.

As for the instrumentalists, it was an equal challenge in the early days to find players skilled enough in such rare antiquities as the oboe d’amore. “When I was studying in Tokyo in the 1970s there were not so many professional ensembles specialising in Baroque excellence.” Suzuki himself eventually set up a department of early music at the University of Tokyo, which has been influential in developing a whole new generation of musicians capable of populating his specialist ensemble.

But what of the other obvious issue – that of developing audience interest in music that was intrinsically anathema, both culturally and spiritually, to Japanese ears? Curiously, that was never a problem for Suzuki. “When we started performing the church cantatas I was amazed that so many people turned out to hear us. It is still generally hard to make it fully understood why Bach’s music was composed, and what it was intended to convey, but we have tried to overcome that from the very earliest days by providing our own Japanese translations of the texts.

“We still do it, and not just for the audiences and singers. Our instrumentalists are keen to know what the singers are singing, so that they can capture the inflexions of the text in their own playing.”

It’s that immaculate attention to detail, combined with a genuinely fresh sense of discovery that gives the BCJ’s performances such a distinctive and distinguished quality. All the more reason to head to Perth Concert Hall next week.

• The Bach Collegium Japan features exclusively at Perth Concert Hall from 2–4 March, www.horsecross.co.uk

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