There are three topics you never mention in polite conversation:
1. Religion
2. Politics
3. Which instruments to play Bach?
On the one hand, there is no question in my mind that when it comes to Bach, the HIP movement has gone badly off the rails. There is no need for, as more than one person put it here, 'sowing machine tempi' that were clearly beyond the competence of what most instrumentalists were said to be capable of in Bach's day. There is no point for virtuoso runs to go by at light speed when you can't hear what the notes are. I can understand lots of improvisatory ostentation and bravado in Handel or Vivaldi, but in Bach? Bach would have thrown the singers out of the organ loft. The idea of doing an 'authentic' Mass or a Passion with one-per-a-part is so completely outrageous - even if the singer can be heard over the trumpets (doubtful), all it would take in a polyphonic movement is the mistake of one singer, and the entire ensemble could go off the rails.
Bach is meant to be austere, his knowledge of musical trends in Italy and France was entirely abstract, and anything which smacked of decadence was antithetical to his puritanical worldview. Bach is a cathedral, every note matters as much as an architectural brick. He is a 17th century celestial machine, like a grandfather clock. The miracle of Bach is that his music is pure mechanics, and yet every musical gear has infinite emotion.
BUT! Here's the thing about HIP, it arrived in response to obvious problems. There's a reason that Bach and Handel were considered just an occasional sideshow in a performance season: the reason is that the instruments and techniques were designed for music written 150 years later. For all our fond memories of Karl Richter and company, most choruses couldn't sing baroque music very well, most orchestras sounded badly balanced, and there was no way for 2-3 hour performances of unvarying solemnity not to try the attention span.
So in retrospect, the Harnoncourts and Leonhardts were the side of right, it's the Gardiners and Koopmans who were not. With the potential exceptions of Herreweghe and van Veldhoven, the next generation put the HIP forces on the same sort of excess and addictions. But rather than bloat in the name of profundity, we got virtuosity in the name of passion, and there is a direct line of descent from Gardiner and Koopman to the anomie of McCreesh and Minkowski. However excellent all four can be in other music, they're no Bachians. We won't even get started with how strange Bach has gotten in recent years....
There are exceptions in both directions, there are always exceptions. If you can't hear the appeal of Jochum in Bach, I feel sorry for you, but if you don't get the appeal of Bach when done by Mazaaki Suzuki, I feel equally sorry. Both approaches may fall definitively on one side of the HIP debate, but they find ways around it to capture Bach in both his grandeur and his intimacy.
But like with Mozart, there seemed to arrive a 'golden generation' for Bach born around the 1920s and 30s that synthezied the best of old and new, and they were on either side of the HIP ledger: Harnoncourt, Rilling, Leonhardt, Ericson, Bruggen, Corboz, Peter Schreier when he conducted... what made them mostly unique in the strange cult of Bach performance was that they were not encumbered by questions of style. They realized the value of both approaches, and consequently could probe for content as few have before or since. It is impossible to capture the meanings of this music unless you're willing to both have the warmth which a genuine string section allows for, and also the clarity which you can only get from keeping the orchestra smaller than one you use for later music.
But then, there's the Thomanerchor, year in year out, beholden to the unbroken tradition of sound that goes back half-a-millenium before Bach himself. Whatever the stylistic preferences of its cantor, there is that sound, the only true ring of authenticity in Bach, from which you can hear a sound that plausibly fits Bach's counterpoint like a glove.
Here they are under their former cantor, Georg Christoph Biller not too long before his sad retirement and passing due to a neurological disease. There are two B-Minor Masses (sic) on youtube. One from the beginning of his tenure, one from near the end. The first with the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the second Freiburger Barockorchester. The first is very good, but this is greatness. By this time he'd been working with them for sixteen years, and it has that incisive authority of a director who'd long shaped his ensemble and get exactly what he wants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCWMUt0KmY4
This is Bach.
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