We are about to enter the passion season, when choirs and choral societies throughout the land feel duty bound to tackle either the St John or the St Matthew Passion. The Bach passions have become so central to European musical culture that it is hard to believe that for more than 70 years after the composer's death, the St Matthew Passion went unperformed - and was even considered unperformable. It was only restored to the canon in February 1829, when Felix Mendelssohn, then aged 20, conducted two performances in Berlin.
Mendelssohn's hugely significant deed of restoration was celebrated and re-created in this performance, for which Roger Norrington conducted the Orchestra and Chorus of the Age of Enlightenment and the London Symphony Chorus. Norrington scrupulously followed the score that Mendelssohn prepared for his Berlin performances, with the same cuts, platform layout and orchestral substitutions.
It was a beautifully researched piece of musical archaeology, though perhaps producing fewer surprises than one might have expected. The overall impression was how like many of today's performances Mendelssohn's must have sounded: transparent and relatively intimate, with smallish bodies of strings in each orchestra positioned behind the choirs seated at the front of the stage. A fortepiano supplied the continuo, and in the only major change of tone colour, the oboes d'amore and oboes da caccia in Bach's scoring were replaced with clarinets and basset horns, producing a richly mellow backdrop to the soprano arias in part two.
Those arias belonged to a privileged few, for while the recitative was kept more or less intact, Mendelssohn dropped many of the arias and half the chorales, emphasising the element of storytelling rather than that of contemplation in the score, so that more than an hour's music was missing. Certainly, the performance moved with directness and a sense of drama, helped immeasurably by James Gilchrist's superbly involving singing as the Evangelist, and well-judged interventions from James Rutherford as Christ and Joanne Lunn and Wilke te Brummelstroete as soprano and mezzo soloists. This is not how one would want to hear the St Matthew Passion every day, or even every year - but it was undeniably fascinating.
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