Vox Lumnis

The York Early Music Festival, an outstanding success, came to a triumphant close with a visit from the world-class period music ensemble from Belgium, Vox Lumnis, with the Bach Family Legacy, a contemplation of its role in developing the most sublime Lutheran church music.

Of all the festival’s many fine venues, there can be none more intimately grand than that of York Minster’s Chapter House, a masterpiece of mediaeval architecture, whose fine acoustic seems enhanced by the low vaulted roof, colourful panels and bounty of gilded bosses. The stained glass of seven of the octagon’s walls were still aglow as the 40 candles were lit and the concert in celebration of the Bach family began. Apparently, according to the programme note, there were so many composers of that name in 17th and 18th-century Saxony and Thuringia that a noun ‘ein Bach’ was coined as a synonym for composer.

Founded in 2004, in Namur, Vox Lumnis have gained something of a reputation as Bach specialists, recorded the complete surviving motets of Johann (1604-73), Johann Christoph (1642-1703) and Johann Michael Bach (1648- 94) in an acclaimed two-CD set. Tonight we heard but a glorious selection.

At first we did not see the full ensemble, led by bass, Lionel Meunier, since in the first piece, appropriately entitled Unser Leben Ist Ein Schatten (‘our life is a shadow’), by Johann Bach, the earliest member of the extended family, three of the five sopranos sang from without, creating a most beautifully haunting vesper-like quality. There was an immediate sense that here was a sound that was sacred, numinous, surpassingly beautiful.

Using single-part harmonies, each blended voice part of a divine whole yet each vocal line with its own clarity, beauty and purpose clearly distinguishable, the ensemble wove its choric way beautifully through a hundred years of music, the individual members constantly shifting shape and position, somehow dictated by the dynamics, nay the aesthetics, of the piece.

The balance between voices and instruments, organ (Bert Jacobs) and violone (Benoit Van den Bremden) was perfect. Heard chronologically, it became possible to clearly discern the transition from early-music gravity and sonority to the more expansive genius of Johann Christoph in the next generation. Listening to the antecedents of JS Bach (1685-1750), we became aware we were doing nothing less than tapping into the roots of the greatest composer of his age - whose simple yet ineffably beautiful Jesu, Meine Freude brought the performance to a reverential close.

Truly, Vox Lumnis are luminous of voice.

Vox Lumnis, The Bach Family Legacy appeared at the Chapter House, York Minster, on Friday 12th July.