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Daily album review 28: Musicological obsessions don't make for a better St Matthew Passion

By John Terauds on December 2, 2013

jacobs

Conductor René Jacobs and a considerable group of remarkable musicians have created a fine new recording of J.S. Bach’s St Matthew Passion with a complex backstory of largely academic interest.

Released this fall on the Harmonia Mundi label, this out-of-season recording brings together fantastic soloists, the Rias Chamber Choir, the City and Cathedral Choir of Berlin and the German capital’s Academy of Ancient Music in a historically informed performance that takes the informed aspect to extremes.

In the booklet as well as a 46-minute film included in a bonus DVD people obsess over how to most accurately recreate the experience of Bach’s divided choirs and soloists. It makes a huge difference in a real concert space, but does it really matter on a recording?

The most fastidious purists will wonder about left-right and other forms of spatial balance in the sound. The rest of us will care more about how nicely the singers and period instrumentalists convey this intense sacred work and its many emotions.

These people do very nicely, with Jacobs generously emphasizing emotional content over keeping strict musical time — with beautiful results. This is music as human as the story being told.

Does the fuss over how many singers stood where in St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig make a difference to the result? Not a bit.

What does make a difference is how much latitude a conductor allows for expressive variation. It also raises the question of how much is too much. But that’s for the ear of the beholder to decide.

My personal standard remains a slightly stricter yet remarkably emotionally rich version recorded (also for Harmonia Mundi) by Philippe Herreweghe and the Collegium Vocale Ghent in 1999, which has Ian Bostridge as the Evangelist, among other treats.

For more details click here.

This is the promotional video:

John Terauds

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