Home listening - not one but two fine new recordings of Bach’s Mass in B minor

The Guardian 0

William Christie and Les Arts Florissants go head to head with Stephen Layton’s choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. Plus, music to mark Orthodox Easter

• Two new recordings of Bach’s Mass in B minor (1749) remind us that performers cannot resist this pinnacle of the repertoire. Among historically informed accounts, Philippe Herreweghe has recorded it three times, John Eliot Gardiner twice, 30 years apart. Now here’s another by the Bach veteran William Christie and his predominantly French group Les Arts Florissants (Harmonia Mundi), recorded live in Paris’s Philharmonie.