Christmas Oratorio, Cadogan Hall, London, review: The trumpets’ flamboyant conclusion to the work showed Bach at his most life-affirming, exuberant best

Bach’s Christmas Oratorio isn’t really an oratorio at all, but a set of six cantatas to cover the six days from Christmas to the Epiphany, including New Year’s Day. Japanese conductor Maasaki Suzuki joined the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (AOE) and split the cantatas over two evenings. Like Bach, Suzuki is an Evangelical Protestant – he has cited conveying “God’s message” through Bach’s work as a key objective.

Suzuki recorded all of Bach’s sacred cantatas over 18 years with his increasingly respected Bach Collegium Japan. He belongs to a tradition of Bach performance that includes Gustav Leonhardt and Ton Koopman, with whom he studied. Accordingly, much in evidence for the final part on Saturday were the virtues of restrained drama, perfect tempi and the kind of musical good taste that stands the test of time.

Jeremy Budd’s light tenor made an ideal evangelist though a little underpowered in the arias, while Anna Dennis shone throughout, especially in Flößt, mein Heiland, the “echo” aria, shared between soprano and oboe. But it was the AOE’s instrumentalists who really made the evening: Katharina Spreckelsen’s playing of the oboe is thing of wonder – worth following wherever she goes. Ursula Paludan Monberg and Martin Lawrence were superb on natural horn whose edge of difficulty always lends them a timbre of vulnerability unknown to the bully-boy certainties of modern horns. And the trumpets’ flamboyant conclusion to the work showed Bach at his most life-affirming, exuberant best.