Sunday brought a greater baroque masterpiece, the Mass in B minor, which Bach compiled close to the end of his life, bequeathing a wonderful compendium of his art at its most awesome.
Refreshingly, the remarkable Crouch End Festival Chorus refused to acknowledge the pedestal on which so many Bacholaters have set the work, approaching it instead with exuberant solidity of tone in every voice and a lithe, sinewy sense of line.
David Temple is clearly an inspirational conductor, and one who conveys an infectious exhilarationin his music-making. Just occasionally he overblew the cadences at the ends of movements, and some of his tempi were just on the wrong side of comfortable for the soloists.
Among these, Lynda Russell and Susan Bickley were on particularly fine form both in solo and duet (though Russell was over-balanced by tenor Hilton Marlton). Instrumental obbligati were generally well-taken by members of the youthful London Orchestra da Camera.
Orchestrally, Temple steered a compromise between "period" and "traditional" styles, and it came as a big surprise to find a piccolo B-flat trumpet among the ranks - but how brilliantly it conveyed Bach's stratospheric visionary ascents.
