A Bach X-mas

No doubt about it: Bach’s the greatest! Here we have a dutifully devout 18th century Lutheran who produced music as regular as clockwork to serve his church, but who speaks to humanity with the broadest of musical strokes, doing meaningfully more with melody, harmony and counterpoint than anyone before or since.

Raymond Leppard conducted the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra’s ‘Classical Christmas’ concert Dec. 20.

Returning to the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra last Saturday from his laureate status, Raymond Leppard led a select group of ISO players, guest soprano Joan Rodgers and the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir Chamber Singers. The Scottish Rite Cathedral Ballroom was packed for the annual ISO Classical Christmas concert — an event Leppard inaugurated in 1997. And yes, this program was all-Johann Sebastian, all bearing the stamp of Bach’s genius.

Rodgers, singing in five selections, lacked an optimum voice for the Baroque idiom: She displayed a rapid, wide vibrato bordering on wobbliness. Moreover, Rodgers tended toward a somewhat closed sound in her opening aria from Cantata No. 120. Still, she projected quite uniformly over her entire registration, which helped in the ensuing and beloved “Sheep may safely graze” from Cantata No. 208. Her chorale, or hymn tune — as Leppard calls it — was, nonetheless, outcompeted by a Karen Moratz/Robin Peller flute duo. They carried the rhythmic counterline upon which the fame of this piece rests, something Bach does better than anyone else in the universe.

Paired oboes and a bassoon accompanied Rodgers in an aria from the St. Matthew Passion, again surpassing the singer as the center of attention.

Rodgers had no competition in the concluding “Stay always beside me” from the Anna Magdelena (Bach’s second wife) notebook. Still, I would have preferred a leaner, “purer” voice throughout.

The choir took front and center with the most familiar “Jesu, joy of man’s desiring” from Cantata No. 147. Here, the chorale offers as famous a line as the accompanying strings’ triplet figurations — the two offering a unique Gestalt in choral/instrumental writing — known and heard everywhere throughout the world.

If I had to pick a “best” of the evening, it would certainly be the Sinfonia and final chorale from Part 2 of the Christmas Oratorio. The non-vocal Sinfonia opens the part with a sublime subject for the winds — as nostalgically lyric as anything from the Romantic era — followed by the same motif interspersed into yet another hymn tune. I noted a rough start but by then didn’t care.