Bach Matthew Passion Roskilde

Bach wrote his passion-oratorio during the first year of his assumption of duties in Leipzig. The city fathers were rather strict in their Lutheranism, and forbade anything that remotely smacked of the newly-found opera craze that was infecting the country at the time, and seeped into the passion music of such luminaries like Telemann. As a result Bach was constrained, if such a word can be used, to employing the gospel only as the source of his libretto. Because of this the St. John Passion has perhaps the greatest text of any passion ever written, and Bach was determined to make the piece worthy of the scriptures he was setting.

When it came to writing Passions, C. P. E. Bach was certainly far more prolific than his father, whose St. Matthew is by far and away the model against which all others are currently measured. He wrote 21 of these, or rather, he wrote bits and pieces of each one, the rest of which was cobbled together from works by his contemporaries and even his father. These were apparently required for the Easter season in Hamburg, and even his predecessor, Telemann, was obligated to write copious numbers of Passions as part of his employment in that city. When this recording was made in 1994, the only surviving work seemed to be a St. Mark Passion that existed in a score in Cologne, which was remarkable in that it seemed to be an original independent work that belied the knowledge that Bach had in fact written his Passions as pastiches.
FANFARE: Bertil van Boer

Hermann Max came to the fore in the first place with the Rheinische Kantorei and the Baroque Orchestra Das Kleine Konzert through a series of productions for the Westdeutscher Rundfunk. He is considered as one of the principal researchers and developers of the HIP, which has become the prevailing approach to the performance of early music today. The ideals that guided him in directing his choir are based on the Italian tradition: a bright sound, precise diction, secure intonation, transparency and lightness.

Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental St. Matthew Passion was first performed on Good Friday in 1727 at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. It is the largest single composition Bach ever wrote, both in terms of length and in terms of instrumental and vocal forces. It requires two choruses, two orchestras, four vocal soloists for the arias and vocal soloists for each of the various character parts. Philippe Herreweghe's 1999 recording of Bach's masterpiece features a stellar cast and was a perennial catalog bestseller.

Bach’s St. John Passion with a star-studded lineup of soprano Johennette Zomer, countertenor Andreas Scholl, tenor MLike Koopman's reading of the St Matthew Passion last year, this is an intimate, if occasionally idiosyncratic, account. His understanding and shaping of the structure of the work produce powerful results, while an intuitive sense of pacing means the more contemplative sections serve to heighten the main dramatic narrative, rather than interrupt it. Koopman also achieves a sensitive balance between voices and instruments, so that the solo singers become very much part of the contrapuntal texture, and the instrumental parts are given due focus.

Les Voix Baroques and Arion Baroque Orchestra combine their outstanding talents for this new ATMA recording of Bach’s St. John Passion under the direction of organist and conductor Alexander Weimann. This recording was made in the chapel of the Grand Séminaire in Montreal, following performances in the 2010 Bach Festival.

It's incredible that a work considered as securely at the core of the Western musical canon as J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion didn't receive a complete recording until after the Second World War, and that prior to that, unabridged performances were exceptionally rare; even Mendelssohn's momentous 1841 Leipzig performance was heavily cut, and Mendelssohn's son reported that even so, much of the audience "fled yawning before it was over." The earliest nearly complete recording was made in 1941 with Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra and Thomanernchor, and those same forces are brought together again, along with the Tölzer Knabenchor, in this 2009 performance led by Riccardo Chailly.

Among traditional modern-instrument versions of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Wolfgang Gönnenwein’s 1968 recording has a lot to offer. Not least is the excellent choral singing from top to bottom. The texts are always clear, and the pacing for the chorales is governed by the story’s dramatic unfolding. You can’t help but be hooked by Evangelist Theo Altmeyer’s warm tone and vivid portrayal, complemented by Franz Crass’ sonorous, touching Jesus. What a joy it is to hear Teresa Zylis-Gara, Julia Hamari, and Hermann Prey at the peak of their respective powers. Tenor Nicolai Gedda is heard to better advantage with Gönnenwein than in Otto Klemperer’s recording, where he struggled with that conductor’s craggy tempos. The orchestra plays beautifully, and the engineering does full justice to Bach’s antiphonal interplay.