Bach: Cantatas & Arias - Bicket, Watts, The English Concert (2011)

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Bach: Cantatas & Arias - Bicket, Watts, The English Concert (2011)

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Winner of the 2006 Kathleen Ferrier Award and the 2007 Cardiff Song Prize, soprano Elizabeth Watts, makes her harmonia mundi début in a luminous programme of Bach cantatas and arias, deftly supported by The English Concert, led by Harry Bicket.

With a voice described by International Record Review as “one of the most beautiful Britain has produced in a generation”, Elizabeth Watts is now securely established as “one of the brightest new talents” (The Independent). After training as a chorister at Norwich Cathedral, Elizabeth went on to study archaeology at Sheffield University before attending the Royal College of Music in London. Her many prizes include the 2006 Kathleen Ferrier Prize (UK), the 2007 Outstanding Young Artist Award at the Cannes MIDEM Classique Awards and the Rosenblatt Recital Song Prize at the 2007 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. A former ‘BBC New Generation Artist’, she was invited to become an Artist in Residence at London’s Southbank Centre in 2010. Now equally in demand as a recitalist, opera singer, and concert artist, she has already appeared at many of the world’s leading musical centres and festivals, including the Royal Opera House, London, Wigmore Hall, Welsh National Opera, the BBC Proms, Santa Fe Opera, Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, and has upcoming engagements throughout Europe from Amsterdam to Zurich.

Internationally renowned conductor Harry Bicket is especially noted for his interpretation of Baroque and Classical repertoire. In 2007 he became Artistic Director of The English Concert, which he has led on tours in the UK, USA, Europe and the Middle East.

He has won high praise world wide for his work in opera, including at The Royal Opera Covent Garden, Glyndebourne Festival, Opera North, Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona. He made his debut at The Metropolitan Opera in 2004 in a new production of Rodelinda with Renée Fleming and David Daniels, and returned to conduct Giulio Cesare in 2006 and La clemenza di Tito in 2008.

Future projects with The English Concert include a recording featuring Lucy Crowe for harmonia mundi.

Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach
Performer: Elizabeth Watts
Conductor: Harry Bicket
Orchestra/Ensemble: English Concert

Reviews: This disc has put me in a brown mood. Elizabeth Watts, like UPS, delivers the goods. And it’s the whole package. The program is all Bach, but was clearly designed to test Watts’s considerable range of talents, interpretively as well as technically. In a word (or five), she passes with flying colors. There are silvery high notes and dusky low ones, rapid passagework and floated sustained tones, plus introspection and exuberance—all delivered with well-justified confidence. Watts is neither reluctant nor embarrassed to use her vibrato. She is at her best in Cantata 199, where her journey from abject self-loathing (“My heart swims in blood”) to joyful acceptance (“How joyful is my heart”) is utterly convincing and natural. The coloratura showpiece, BWV 51, is not quite as successful. The breakneck pace of the first aria is a bit too ambitious, and the Alleluia tends to teeter on the edge of disaster. But Watts never quite stumbles, and ends triumphantly. Of course, in that respect she has plenty of company. Emma Kirkby (on Philips) remains the unrivaled mistress of Cantata 51.


The four arias, well chosen for their variety, are welcome supplements to the two cantatas. Harry Bicket’s accompaniment is sympathetic and supportive. His English Concert needs no introduction, though its members may to listeners who recall its halcyon days under the leadership of Trevor Pinnock. Oboist Katharina Spreckelsen and trumpeter Mark Bennett are outstanding collaborators for Watts. Overall, this is a rewarding disc, well recommended.