Having finally faced the fact that my Catholicism was
lapsed, my mother extracted from me the promise that I would never fail
to do my Easter Duty – that is, attend confession and church once a
year at Easter time, as an insurance against the flames of Hell. Of
course, I haven’t kept the promise, in common with thousands of others,
but on Sunday at the RFH I felt as though I was amongst many of those
who were doing just that, or rather thought they were, putting themselves
through a day of Bach in English being about as near as any of them
wanted to get to purging their guilt.
These performances by The Bach Choir are of course
well known for their atmosphere of piety: the programme tells us that
‘Due to the nature of this work, The Bach Choir requests that there
should be NO APPLAUSE before, during or after the performance.
If you would like to show your appreciation, you are invited to stand
at the end of the performance.’ Or, in other words, ‘This piece
is about God so for some reason you shouldn’t clap, but do please give
us a standing ovation at the end.’ To me, nothing could be more daft:
my love for Bach’s music does almost approach worship, but there are
basically two ways of performing the Passions – either you see them
as religious works, in which case you do them in a church with small
forces, applause being naturally inappropriate, or you see them as semi-dramatic
works, in which case you do them in a concert hall with whatever size
of forces is at your command, and you let the audience receive them
as concert audiences normally do.
Bach’s music is for everyone, and we do not need to
believe in the story to be deeply moved by it, but in this middleweight,
careful performance that kind of emotion was in short supply. The finest
singing, appropriately, came from the choir itself, supplemented by
representatives of no fewer than seven schools in the Ripieno Chorus:
David Hill’s direction ensured that the attack on first lines was always
clean, the diction exemplary and the balance between the voices ideal,
but there was very little sense of the emotional weight of the work
– I have seldom been left so unmoved by ‘O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde
gross’ and ‘Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder’ but this was a reaction,
or rather lack of it, which I had throughout, stemming at least partly
from the translation. I seem to recall the latter chorale being translated
as ‘In tears of grief, dear Lord, we greet you’ for past performances,
but here we got ‘We bow our heads in tears and sorrow’ – a bit limp
to say the least, but this was nothing compared to what the soloists
had to sing. I won’t labour this point, suffice to say that translating
‘Und sie wurden sehr betrübt’ as ‘They had indignation’ and ‘Und
er nahm den Kelch, und dankete, gab ihnen den und sprach – Trinket alle
daraus…’ as ‘And he took the cup and gave thanks and gave it to them
saying – Drink ye all of it…’ could hardly be described as graceful.
The story depends upon the evangelist who narrates
it, and Christopher Gillet was a worthy, careful storyteller who introduced
us to some of the drama without ever moving as the greatest evangelists
can. The rôle of Christ was nobly taken at short notice by Roderick
Earle, replacing Jonathan Best and singing with confidence and perception.
The contralto Lynette Alcantara was another stand-in, this time for
Catherine Wyn-Rogers but hers was a less happy performance, seeming
ill at ease and never really getting to grips with the demanding arias.
Lynne Dawson was the very experienced soprano, able
to make the words tell in her recitatives but seeming a little wayward
in some of the arias, especially ‘Blute nur, du liebes Herz’. Timothy
Robinson sang the tenor arias sweetly, if rather nervously, and Neal
Davies was highly dramatic as the High Priest and sang the bass arias
with a real sense of involvement. ‘Mache dich, mein Herze, rein’ found
him a little strained, but the preceding recitative was beautifully
phrased, and he succeeded in moving me with the quality of his intonation
at ‘Weil es dem lieben Gott gefällt’.
The playing was exemplary throughout, with some especially
fine work from the oboes of the first orchestra and violins of the second
(Matthew Truscott the superb soloist in ‘Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder)
and the continuo was neatly supportive and thankfully never sought to
draw undo attention to itself. That phrase could well stand for the
whole event – well prepared and worthy rather than uplifting.
Melanie Eskenazi
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