BACH'S COLOSSUS

Pygmalion's visceral rendition of the B-Minor Mass.

- BY ALEX ROSS

Bach’s Mass in B Minor begins with a majestic howl of pain—four adagio bars that combine formal grandeur with writhing interior lines, as if figures in a cathedral frieze of the Last Judgment were coming to life. The text is “Kyrie eleison,” or “Lord, have mercy,” and the distribution of the words in the chorus suggests the flailing of a desperate crowd. Half the sopranos sing “Kyrie, Kyrie, eleison, eleison,” the other half sing “Kyrie, eleison, eleison, eleison”; the altos sing “Kyrie, eleison, Kyrie, eleison,” the tenors and basses “Kyrie, Kyrie, Kyrie, eleison.” Only the first and last chords in the sequence are solid triads, the rest tinged by dissonance to one degree or another. The orchestration is a touch grotesque, with the first violins given a shrill D two octaves above middle C.

The bass line retreats toward the treble, creating further instability. After a moment of repose on F-sharp major, an immense fugue on “Kyrie eleison” unfolds, in two gradually cresting and subsiding waves—ten minutes of sublime churn.

A new recording of the B-Minor Mass by the French ensemble Pygmalion, under the direction of Raphaël Pichon, delivers that four-bar exordium with maximum force. The weight of the sound—incorporating five vocal soloists, thirty choristers, and thirty-three instrumentalists—harks back to lumbering mid-twentieth-century accounts by Otto Klemperer and Hermann Scherchen, before the original-instrument movement dictated light textures and fleet tempos. Yet period style still adheres, the timbres pungent rather than plush. Urgency animates each component of the whole, whether it’s the punchy “K’s in the male voices or the penetrating chants of “eleison” in the sopranos. A sharp intake of breath before the first chord heightens the impact. The plea for mercy is dire: arms are held up to ward off a blow.