FringeReview UK 2024
St John Passion Bach Collegium Japan/Masaaki Suzuki
Bach Collegium Japan/Masaaki Suzuki
Genre: Live Music
Venue: BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall, Kensington
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Bach’s St John Passion that Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki
Suzuki keeps his gleaming ensemble both airborne and dramatic, both light and yet delivering the weight of his great Passion, becoming something of a favourite. We relate to its humanity leaner and more dramatic and emotional than the St Matthew. A Passion for our time.
Review
Bach was for long famed for his St Matthew Passion as a pinnacle of his liturgical works. Recently, there’s been strong redress. As we’ve been reminded, there are so many versions of the earlier, leaner and more dramatic and emotional St John Passion that Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki has performed another version earlier this year, that absorbed other elements wholesale: including Motets and some from the St Matthew. It’s a speciality of Suzuki’s, and his recording of it is justly celebrated.
Here, despite signalling the original 1724 date, there’s nods to revisions from 1725, 1732, 1739 (the version from earlier this year) and 1749. In other words spanning the whole of Bach’s time at Leipzig. Of which this Passion was designed to cement his relationship wit the burghers and not go on at length, as they stipulated. He clearly felt five years later comfortable in flouting that at least once with the St Matthew, half as long again as this Passion.
Coming in at exactly the 108 minutes billed, this fleet, but somehow expansive work is kept trim and punchy in his big recitatives and chorales and allowed to blossom with all eternity at their backs, as soloists expand over the arias.
The soloists are wonderful, if up in the gallery their voices seems attenuated in this vast space. Carolyn Sampson particularly held attention in her two arias. The fearless disciple in No 9 “I follow thee too, my Saviour, With Joy” and No. 35 “Dissolve then, heart, in floods of tears” after Christ’s death. As Sampson sang the world dissolves briefly too.
These were quite the most affecting, matched too by counter-tenor Alexander Chance’s Aria in No.30 “It is accomplished’ with the viola da gamba accompaniment, (Emilio Moreno and Sonoko Asabuki). Again time stood still as the viola da gambas wound round the eddy of death sun by Chance.
There’s superb work too from tenor Shimon Yoshida, and bass Christian Immler. Both as Jesus and Pilate, where he inflects a difference notable for its probing exchanges. His fermatas, those underscoring finalities of pronouncements firmed the narrative. You always know exactly where you are.
Tenor Benjamin Bruns has most to do. As Evangelist his recitatives are often long, and he inflects those, including the more sun or accompanied ones with great variety and point.
Suzuki keeps his gleaming ensemble both airborne and dramatic, both light and yet delivering the weight of his great Passion, becoming something of a favourite. We relate to its humanity, even if it refuses the transcendental attempts of the St Matthew’s last pages, which is equals in its last chorus, it also – dare one say – lacks its longeurs: a Passion for our time.
