Interview, John Butt on Bach's Christmas Oratorio

John Butt and his Dunedin Consort are now very much established as leading proponents of historically-informed, small-forces early music; they've released several highly successful recordings of Bach on this basis, including both his Passion settings and the B minor Mass.

Now they've turned to his great Christmas Oratorio, approaching it in the same way as the other works (and their broader, non-Bach repertoire). I caught up with John Butt to talk about this album, and he was kind enough to share some of his thoughts…

Although we call it an oratorio, the six component cantatas of the Christmas Oratorio would have been performed on separate days during the season of Christmas. Your recordings are known for their attention to historical performance practices – do you think performing the Oratorio as one “piece” is a departure from this principle?

That’s an interesting question, since performing only one cantata in a concert environment today would not be particularly efficient (although I’d welcome the opportunity to perform them on the ‘correct’ days over Christmas). But there’s no doubt that the oratorio does not cohere in the way the Mass and Passions do. There are certainly elements of balance and correspondence that relate to the six parts as a whole (e.g. the first and last chorale melody is the same, and D Major works as a sort of tonic for the whole work). Here the CD format is particularly useful since it is easy to hear the work both in its original 6-part form, with a gap between each cantata, or as a whole in one sitting.

The Dunedin Consort is also known for using very small vocal forces; in this Christmas Oratorio you alternate between a quartet and an octet. Given that ripieno parts for the Oratorio are not extant, how did you make decisions on vocal texture?

It’s quite possible that Bach never used more than four singers for the entire Christmas Oratorio. When ripieno parts do survive, they are often connected with Christmas pieces, which might suggest that Bach sometimes went for a more sumptuous scoring at this time of year. I decided to use the extra four singers for the three parts involving trumpets (just as Bach himself did for his Cantata 110, for instance).

The notes accompanying the recording refer to Bach’s musicians having been exceptionally versatile by today’s standards, quite happily swapping between instrumental and vocal roles from week to week. Do you think modern performers could learn from this model, or do you imagine the standard in Bach’s time being lower because of it?

This is a question with which Bach himself was concerned. In his famous ‘Sketch for a well-appointed church music’ of 1730 he writes enviously of the musicians at Dresden who are only required to play one instrument and therefore they achieve a more refined level. In other words, Bach came from the ‘old’ apprenticeship model but hankered after the ‘modern’ model of highly targeted musical study of a single instrument or voice. I think we need to try and adopt both – excel in one medium but have as much facility as possible in other areas of music.

You’ve already recorded both Passions, the Mass in B minor and the Magnificat; as far as Bach’s major choral works go, this is the last big gap. Where do you go from here in terms of repertoire?

Our next recording will in fact be of Bach’s orchestral suites. In terms of vocal works we definitely have the Lutheran Masses and the Motets on our list. This is not necessarily a good time to inaugurate yet another sequence of all the cantatas, but I wonder whether we should start to think of something along those lines in 2023, mirroring Bach’s first year a Leipzig, three centuries before.

Recent Bach recordings from the Dunedin Consort