A colleague of mine whose child was preparing for her second time participating in a Christmas reenactment of the nativity reported that her daughter was terribly disappointed: “It’s the same story as last time, Mom,” she complained! Sometimes, I’ve had the same feeling about Bach’s St. John Passion.
Bach treated the story of Jesus’s last days and crucifixion in his St. Matthew Passion, a setting that is monumental in its scope and inexorable in its steady movement toward the final tragedy, punctuated by five different occurrences of the Passion Chorale (“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden [O Sacred Head, Now Wounded]”), which is harmonized differently each time and in a lower key. The St. John Passion, written first, can seem instead like a warm-up, Bach’s first go at the story he would “do better” when he returned to set it again so incomparably in his St. Matthew version.
Or at least it’s often felt like that to me, until I heard this new recording from Rafaël Pichon, fresh from leading his ensemble, Pygmalion, in highly acclaimed recent recordings of Bach’s B Minor Mass and, yes, the St. Matthew Passion. In this performance, the directness and dramatic urgency of the story in the St. John Passion come to the fore. This is a less contained, polished, and safely distanced telling. Instead, it is shocking in the swiftness of its pacing, and the theatrical thrust of the storytelling.
Take the opening chorus. The St. Matthew Passion opens with a mighty triple chorus – a display of contrapuntal skill that majestically displays all of Bach’s power in a piling up of polyphonic lines. In contrast, the St. John Passion opens with a turbulent storm (“Herr, unser Herrscher [Sire, Lord and Master]”): listen to those crunchily dissonant oboes caught up in the churning orchestral strings. We’re in the middle of a crisis, and that dramatic immediacy is conveyed powerfully by the edge-of-your-seat (but always clear and accurate) singing and playing here.
Listening to this recording, I am struck by the way that Pichon and his forces regularly emphasize the immediacy, the rawness, of the story they’re presenting. This is no solemn ritual, safely insulating us from what is, after all, a grisly and shocking death, but a compellingly immediate, dramatic, and unsettling retelling. He has amassed an outstanding set of soloists to help him bring Bach’s gripping setting to life, most centrally Julien Prégardien as the Evangelist (listen to the way his music seems to go off the rails, harmonically, as Peter weeps for his betrayal of Christ at 1:30 of this excerpt) and the baritone Huw Montague Rendall, whose young and beautiful voice seems to embody the sorrowful victim, Christus. Ying Fang, one of the most talented and fresh Mozart sopranos on the scene, shows herself to be mistress of baroque style in her flute-accompanied arias, both the exuberant first and the searingly remorseful second. In fact, the musical glories are too many to enumerate. Among others, the tenor Laurence Kilsby, bass Christian Immler, and contralto Lucile Richardot all deliver heartfelt and urgent performances of their solos.
It took this powerfully theatrical reading to get me to see that Bach’s “other” passion has a compelling drama that is toned down in his later, more contemplative and controlled, return to the same story. Pichon and company are as musically alert and flexibly responsive to the challenges and strengths of this version as in their previous recordings. Don’t miss this chance to encounter the immediacy of this performance, consummately musical and theatrically gripping in equal parts.
