“Lord, our ruler”: the frightened and imploring chord progression with which the opening words to Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. John Passion are intoned by the choir has already been heard humbly, trustingly, and quite demandingly, but it has hardly been shouted out as tormentedly, almost yelled, as in the most recent recording by John Eliot Gardiner (Deutsche Grammophon).
It is his third with this work, and the Briton, who is approaching his ninth decade of life, is obviously not in the mood for old age.
Culture, delicate balance – who conveyed this better than the Monteverdi Choir, which he had shaped over the decades, with the English Baroque Soloists who were symbiotically connected to them?
All of this seems to take a back seat here, although it is of course the indispensable prerequisite for being able to go to such extremes now.
In the detonating, rushing voices, sudden tempo increases, and snappingly excited passages of dialogue, the law of the immediately relived bloody drama of the condemnation, torture and execution of an innocent man by a frenzied mob prevails: commented on by the voices of the soloists, who sometimes share the excitement, sometimes in a painfully mystical way Visions take off, roughly presented in the twitching, hysterical howling of the folk choirs and not only reaching into the orchestral voices during the tumultuous tumult of the earthquake.
The two surviving passions of Johann Sebastian Bach are among those pieces that posterity can never come to terms with.
For decades there has certainly been a clear direction of movement from sonorous, majestic monumentality to almost cinematic directness;
within this, however, there are always new, surprising turns and interpretations.
Gardiner's striking radicalism finds a related experimental side piece in a Matthew Passion by the French "Pygmalion" formation under Raphaël Pichon (harmonia mundi).
Both were created almost simultaneously last April, the latter as a long-term studio recording, the English recording as a live stream from the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford.
Its amphitheatrical structure, in which the choir and the soloists embedded in it (Pichon thinks the same way, although its cast is somewhat more lavish overall) spread out widely due to the corona, plays an important role because the distances between the actors remain audible in the recording and for example, in the Turba choirs, the impression of an unleashed and slobbering, heaving mass is heightened.
In the chorales and the final chorus, on the other hand, there is a quiet, often almost introverted intimacy that is enlivened by fine dynamic gradations.
In contrast, Pichon's choral and orchestral direction is more tempered and less excessively fissured, yet consistently powerful, with generally tight tempos in every bar focused on the dramatic interplay of affects and by no means lacking in contrast.
On the contrary: the way he lets his ensemble slide into the following chorale without any break after the chilling scream of “Barrabam!” and the howling desire to crucify Jesus has the hypnotic effect of slipping into a state of secondary reality .
While Gardiner, on the contrary, often speaks through emphatic cuts when he interrupts the flow of events with general pauses that yawn into emptiness.