Bach John

This recording of J.S. Bach's John Passion gives listeners a refreshing outlook, shining a new light into one of the best known pieces of the choral repertoire. John Butt recreates the Good Friday vesper liturgy of a passion performance during Bach's time at Leipzig; in addition to the Dunedin Consort performance of Bach's composition, this recording features music from an original Leipzig hymn book with works by Jacob Händl, J. H. Schein and J. Crüger performed by a congregational choir and the University of Glasgow Chapel Choir. John Butt takes centre stage to perform organ chorale preludes by Bach and Schütz on the Collins organ at Greyfriar's Kirk in Edinburgh, where the recording took place.

John Holloway and Davitt Moroney have set up a musically rewarding partnership in these brilliantly inventive works, furthermore adding to their programme the two lovely sonatas for violin and continuo long attributed to Bach, and justly so. In both of them they are joined by Susan Sheppard (continuo cello). For these sonatas Moroney has preferred a chamber organ to a harpsichord.

In this recording of Bach’s Suite No. 1, John Eliot Gardiner follows Passepieds I and II with Bach’s own setting of the chorale Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen BWV 299. The joyous text celebrates praise and discipleship, prolonging the suite’s exuberant mood. No other recorded version features a vocal tailpiece, but if you don’t like it, simply program your player to skip track 8. It’s good to find both parts of the Overtures to these works repeated (Frans Brüggen omits second-section repeats), but at times Gardiner can seem too rugged and unyielding for what is, after all, ceremonial or occasional music.

The Dunedin Consort, under the direction of John Butt, follows its award-winning recording of the Messiah with J.S. Bach's Matthew Passion. This recording cements the Dunedin Consort's reputation as a group with particular expertise in Baroque music and performance practice. The Dunedin Consort has established a reputation for performing familiar works from the Baroque era in ways which shed fresh light on the original performance: this new recording presents the Matthew Passion for the first time with Bach's final revisions of scoring, as performed around 1742 (its most familiar form is the 1736 version).