★★★★☆
The most surprising and touching thing about William Christie’s recording of Bach’s B Minor Mass is the passage in his booklet note where this 73-year-old American-born musician not only starts recalling his mother, but actually refers to her as “Mum”.
She conducted a choir in upstate New York and valiantly dipped into the work’s complexities for one Easter service in the 1950s. It all helped to plant a seed, and Christie’s love of baroque vocal repertoire bears gorgeous new fruit in this bouncy, intimate rendition of one of western civilisation’s glories.
The forces of his ensemble Les Arts Florissants are relatively modest: a choir of 21 voices, with 29 instrumentalists. In the modern fashion, speeds are swift and textures lean. For some that might
