Bach: St. John Passion Gardiner, Padmore, Muller Brachmann (2011)

Few ensembles can come to Bach's St John Passion with quite the degree of performance-based insight that Gardiner and his musicians have done. Written for Good Friday in 1724, the passion was the centrepiece of Bach's year-long cycle of liturgical cantatas. Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir spent 2000 performing and recording these surrounding cantatas, before recording this disc in 2003. The result is a little slice of musical heaven. In sound, it's a masterpiece of technical precision and musical beauty. In tone, it perfectly balances the theatrical with the devotional. The English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir expertly build and release tension, their phrases shaped to sound natural, instinctive, and emotionally complete. The work's many dramatic contrasts are also brilliantly done.