Orchestra plays Bach's "St. Matthew Passion' (1st review)

Conductors know there's more than one way to interpret Bach's monumental St. Matthew Passion. You can reproduce the sound of Bach's era by using period instruments. Or you might use modern instruments to emphasize the transcendent beauty of the music. Or you could recapitulate its original use by Bach as part of the Good Friday service, treating the text as a sermon to the faithful, with an emphasis on the libretto.

But there's a fourth option: to treat the St. Matthew Passion as a dramatic enactment, highlighting the action, the emotions, and the psychological impact of key moments in the Gospel story. In 1943 Balanchine and Stokowski transformed the piece into a "miracle play" at the Metropolitan Opera, complete with actions, gestures, choreography, and costumes. More recently, in 2010, Simon Rattle led a similar performance of the Berlin Philharmonic staged by theater director Peter Sellars.

Perhaps with the Philadelphia Orchestra's current celebration of Stokowski in mind, maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin chose the dramatic approach for the orchestra's first St. Matthew Passion in 30 years. Unlike Stokowski and Balanchine, though, Nézet-Séguin chose a modest use of props and devices.

Shame and guilt

The vocal soloists moved around the stage in dramatic fashion, and some wore swaths of color symbolizing the main characters. The chorus members moved their scores in unison to cover their faces as if to represent shame and guilt, and the musicians wore casual dark garments, perhaps to convey a feeling of humility. Jon H. Weir's lighting highlighted emotions and moods.

These touches created a striking overall effect without interfering with the listening process. In fact, these devices may have helped sustain the audience's attention through a three-hour performance.

No matter how the conductor chooses to set the stage for the St. Matthew Passion, to do it justice he must be aware of its magnificent form and structure. As the consummate Bach conductor and scholar Helmuth Rilling once put it, Bach was a master of musical architecture.

Yannick takes command

Bach and his librettist Picander (Christian Friederich Henrici) created an extraordinary design from an ordinary sequence of oratorio forms—recitative, dialogue of the Passion, arias, orchestral development, and chorale—weaving them into a commentary with music that captured the meanings and emotions within each of the approximately 78 segments, while creating a dynamic totality that relates all the parts to one another. At the same time, Bach achieved an exquisite balance and use of soloists, two orchestras, choirs, continuo and organ.

It was impressive to see and hear a relatively young conductor like Nézet-Séguin take command of these massive forces and structures, moving them forward with care, grace and power. His timing was dramatic and tension-building as he worked with fiery and complex passages of betrayal, "shock and awe" punctuations of choral representations of the horror of Christ's persecution, arias of love, repentance, and grief, chorales expressing faith, and orchestral passages of surpassing beauty.

Under Nézet-Séguin's baton, all the voices, ensembles, and instruments proved strong and effective, somehow managing to maintain strict concert discipline while the soloists moved about the stage, sometimes standing directly in Nézet-Séguin's line of sight.

Inspiring flutes

I was particularly impressed with tenor Andrew Staples' clear and fluid voice as the Evangelist and mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill's beautiful voice and the contemplative mastery of her singing. The violin solos by concertmaster David Kim and assistant concertmaster Juliette Kang nearly moved me to tears with their interpretive clarity and depth.

The flute section plays an important role in this piece, providing both balance to the low-register sections and an instrumental counterpart to the female soloists. First chair flautist Jeffrey Khaner's solos were inspiring in this respect.

How Casals did it

As a college student in New York, 50 years ago almost to the day, I heard an equally memorable performance of the St. Matthew Passion at Carnegie Hall. The conductor, Pablo Casals, had played a key role in the "reinvention" of Bach in the 20th Century, finding new layers of harmony, counterpoint and emotional expression in Bach's music. At the time he was in his late 80s, frail and crippled by arthritis, almost unable to make it to the podium. But he as soon as he picked up the baton, his agility magically returned, and he led a performance of uplifting beauty.

The Casals St. Matthew was completely different from Nézet-Séguin's. It was all about the musical lines as such. The drama was understated and the music unfolded in and of itself. The overall effect was more of grief and loss than of agony and betrayal. But in the end, when the soloist Christ incanted, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" the effect was shattering.

(This concert was recorded for posterity by the New York classical station WNYC, and it's available online in their archives. Click here.)

Why masterpieces survive

I mention that 1963 concert because it shows how in the hands of great conductors and musicians, two diametrically opposite interpretations can be equally valid, effective, and moving. That happens because Bach's work itself reconciles paradoxical elements: simplicity and complexity, the secular and the divine, order and spontaneity, reflection and pulsation.

That's one reason why musical masterpieces can be performed repeatedly over decades and centuries without losing their freshness and their visionary depth. As a musician friend, himself a composer, once said to me, "Pulling together paradoxical realities is something that geniuses do."♦


To read another review by Tom Purdom, click here.
To read a response, click here.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.