Bach - Easter Cantatas BWV 6 & 66 / Fink, Davislim, Clarkson, Chance, Padmore, Henschel, The Monteverdi Choir, The English Baroque Soloists, Gardiner

John Eliot Gardiner's year-2000 project is big, even for him: a "pilgrimage" to perform all of Bach's surviving church cantatas (more than 200) between Christmas 1999 and Christmas 2000 in various churches throughout Europe, with a finale planned for New York City. With so much music, so many places, and so little time, worries about routine, autopilot music-making, and inconsistent performance standards were understandable. It was no doubt prudent for DG to record most of the "Bach Cantata Pilgrimage" series in the studio before the tour began. So it's all the more distressing that, even with Gardiner's famously skillful choir and orchestra recording under studio conditions, the first volume of the series is a disaster. The Monteverdi Choir, renowned as the well-oiled, high-precision machine of the choral world, sings with poor blend and occasionally shaky tuning (practically unheard-of for this group); the orchestral playing is either blaring or blasé; and the soloists sound uninvolved or uncertain, or both. It's hard not to think that everyone was sight-reading the music during the recording sessions. Most unfortunate of all is the once-superb countertenor Michael Chance, whose wobbly, indeterminate, frayed singing is heartbreaking. (Get the much better volume 2 of this series, a reissue of a 1989 recording, to hear just how good he used to be.) DG probably was contractually obligated to release this recording, but Gardiner should be ashamed to have let it leave the studio. Thank goodness that later volumes in this series aren't as bad. --Matthew Westphal