Tír Na HiFi

thanks, Sean...

Seán wrote:

9.30am Building a Library

Jeremy Summerly surveys recordings of Bach’s St Matthew Passion and makes a recommendation

Now that is something that I would be interested in listening to. Thank you Seán!

I'll be glued. I have several horses in the BAL race: will one of them win or will it be an `outsider'?!

Ciaran wrote:I'll be glued. I have several horses in the BAL race: will one of them win or will it be an `outsider'?!

I have two: Bruggen & Suzuki. I am looking forward to it.

Seán wrote:

Ciaran wrote:I'll be glued. I have several horses in the BAL race: will one of them win or will it be an `outsider'?!

I have two: Bruggen & Suzuki. I am looking forward to it.

please let me know the winners... I have JEG & Richter in this dept.

I'm afraid I never get to listen to BAL, because I'm always working on a Saturday morning...

Jared wrote:

Seán wrote:

Ciaran wrote:I'll be glued. I have several horses in the BAL race: will one of them win or will it be an `outsider'?!

I have two: Bruggen & Suzuki. I am looking forward to it.

please let me know the winners... I have JEG & Richter in this dept.

I'm afraid I never get to listen to BAL, because I'm always working on a Saturday morning...

Hi Jared, here you go:

The St Matthew Passion is one choral piece that I have never struggled with. I would suggest that, in my view, it's the greatest single achievement of JSB.

The Butt recording is one that I think I will purchase when I am next able to invest in some Bach. I stand by the JEG recording personally as my 'go to' recording of this masterpiece

On Spy Wednesday I barrelled down to Kilkenny to hear the Matthew Passion in S. Canice's Cathedral



with Resurgam and the Irish Baroque Orchestra conducted by Mark Duley. This excellent performance was still reverberating in my head when I listened to BAL yesterday morning.

It's ten years since J. S. Bach's Matthew Passion featured on BAL (30 March 2002). On that occasion the reviewer was Simon Heighes and the winners were

1. Harnoncourt 3 (2000)
2. Richter (1958) (Modern Instruments/Mid-price Choice)
3. Koopman (1992) (Joint Period Instruments Choice 1)
4. Rheinische Kantorei, Das Kleine Konzert, Hermann Max on Capriccio (recorded 1995) (Joint Period Instruments Choice 2)
5. Vaughan Williams (conductor) (recorded 1958) (Historic Recording Choice)

On that occasion Simon Heighes confessed that he had not been kind to Harnoncourt 3 when he had discussed it before as a recent release on CD Review but with all his comparative listening he had come to appreciate its qualities more and more to the extent that he was making it the top choice!

There have been several important new recordings of Bach's Matthew Passion released since then, among them:

1. Gabrieli Consort, Paul McCreesh (2003: the first commercial recording using One Voice Per Part (OVPP), though Joshua Rifkin had performed it this way long before: I remember hearing a wonderful Radio 3 broadcast of his performance in the 1994 Proms)
2. The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir & Boys Choir of the Sacraments Choir, Breda, Ton Koopman (2008: so not the same one which was "placed" in 2002)
3. Dunedin Consort & Players, John Butt (OVPP, 2007, SACD)
4. The Netherlands Bach Society, Jos van Veldhoven (live, 2010, SACD) (about which I must disagree profoundly with Pepe)
5. La Grande Ecurie & La Chambre du Roy, Jean-Claude Malgoire (live, 2010)
6. Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Thomanerchor Leipzig & Thomanerchor Leipzig, Riccardo Chailly (modern instruments, 2010!)
7. La Petite Bande, Sigiswald Kuijken (OVPP, 2010, SACD, not Kuijken's first recording)

There were more new recordings than that, and interesting historic recordings have also become available, so there was plenty of scope for an new BAL. Speaking for myself, I have three of the new recordings above: McCreesh (2003), van Veldhoven (2010) and Kuijken (2010), as well as Koopman 1994, Harnoncourt 3 (2000) and Suzuki 2000.

This time the reviewer was Jeremy Summerly and in time-honoured BAL tradition when Harnoncourt 3 came up

1. we were not given any indication that it was a previous top choice and
2. it was summarily dismissed (JS later described himself as "harshly critical" of it).

He spent a lot of time on old dinosaur monster-choir performances in English, justifying this by saying that they were documents of a tradition going back to the first English performance in 1854. That's all very well, but very little to do with Bach! This was the tradition that felt that Bach was so important and solemn that he must be performed by huge forces and very slowly. Huge choirs in a boomy acoustic just can't move lightly and gracefully enough for Bach's dances. Torture to listen to! So many people must have been taught that Bach was utterly dreary by these performances!

Harnoncourt's first (1970) performance was praised (JS said he was "awestruck" by it) at the expense of the third from 2000. I didn't find what I heard of Harnoncourt 1 particularly appealing: he was still using massive choirs, but I did get the impression that Kurt Equiluz was an excellent Evangelist and Alice Harnoncourt and Paul Esswood were beautiful in Erbarme dich, though Robin Blaze was even better in Suzuki's version, as JS seemed to acknowledge. Summerley gave away that he had listened to Harnoncourt 1970 frequently when it came out: that can often make it hard to judge even-handedly. He made this his Historical recommendation.

Interestingly, Summerly expected that he would not favour OVPP performances, but was actually won over by them, taking several examples from Kuijken 2010 and eventually choosing Butt's 2007 recording.

Of the seven new recordings listed above, only Kuijken and Butt were mentioned at all (both favourably). I am particularly surprised that neither McCreesh nor van Veldhoven were mentioned as both got a fair amount of attention when they came out, with McCreesh being Record of the Month in Gramophone in May 2003. McCreesh is one of my favourites. I was also surprised that the Gardiner recoding (made in 1987, released '88) was not mentioned. I used to have it on LP and there many beautiful things in it. It featured in the Gramophone awards in 1989.

After Wednesday's Kilkenny performance I commented to another member of the audience on how clear, beautiful and direct the German of Martin Luther's 1522 New Testament is, the recitatives being lifted directly from that, particularly in comparison with the florid and ornate German of Picander's arias, so I was very interested to hear from J Summerly that when he was translating the New Testament, Luther went out into towns and marketplaces to listen to how people spoke and hence translated into a German that was fresh, clear, simple and contemporary: much more like modern German than any English text published in the sixteenth century is like modern English. In fact it formed the basis for modern German. I found it odd that Summerly describes the Evangelist as delivering "the biblical narrative in formulaic but finely-honed recitative". Recitatives in other baroque and classical composers can be dull but to me Bach's are always dramatic and interesting and the recitatives of the Matthew Passion are the most dramatic and musical of all. Maybe Summerly missed some of the drama because his German might not be great: he spoke about "the most dramatic passage of recitative written in the entire Eighteenth Century": Jesus dies and then, according to Summerly "the veil of the temple was torn in two pieces from (top right) to bottom".

"Top right?" I thought: "What?" On checking the German text I found

Und siehe da, der Vorhang im Tempel zerriss in zwei Stück von oben an bis unten aus

which you might translate as

"and look, the veil of the temple was ripped in two pieces from the top to the bottom."

I suspect Summerly was looking at a English translation which where "right to bottom" means "all the way to the bottom" and mistakenly grouped "top" with "right" to get "top right" and an oddly specific directional description of the torn veil. My point here is that the drama of the recitatives is lost on him if his German is weak: he can see the extreme drama written into this one, but misses the rest ("formulaic" indeed!). Indeed Bach's main was to convey the German text with passionate directness, so a reviewer who doesn't quite get the German is missing a lot!

Summerly also failed to inspire confidence when he listed Sting as his fantasy Evangelist, with Paul Robeson as Jesus and Mendelssohn as conductor!

I came very close to getting Summerly's winner, the Dunedin Consort under John Butt on Linn, when it came out, and I may yet, as it's OVPP, which I like and it's an SACD which also appeals. My current favourites are Harnoncourt 2000, which Summerly didn't care for, and McCreesh. I'm hoping that Philippe Pierlot and the Ricercar Consort will record the Matthew Passion: if the planets align correctly, that could be really something!

Ciaran, that is a fascinating and hugely informative post, thanks very much for doing that, I really enjoyed reading it.