Far and away the most enjoyable item I’ve watched recently is the version of Bach’s St John Passion conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt back in 1985, released on DVD last year.
For four years Bach wrote a 30-minute cantata every week. He would rule the staves on the paper on Monday morning, select an appropriate text, then compose the music for instrumentalists, soloists and chorus. The first rehearsal was on the Friday, the second, with the soloists added, on Saturday. The performance was at 8am on the Sunday morning in St Thomas’s Lutheran church in Leipzig.
But Good Friday demanded something special, so he wrote extended works based on the descriptions of Christ’s last hours given by the different evangelists. These semi-dramatic compositions are called “Passions” because, like Mel Gibson’s infinitely inferior film, they depict the suffering (“passion” in its older meaning) and death of Jesus.
Bach’s St Mark Passion has been lost, and the surviving St Luke Passion seems to be by someone else. But the St Matthew Passion is widely considered one of the greatest musical works of all time. The later St John Passion is scarcely less remarkable.
In the mid-1980s Harnoncourt was an enthusiast for “authentic” performances of Baroque music, i.e. ones using the instruments of the period rather than their modern equivalents. This is the case on this DVD, and it’s its weakest feature. Recorders instead of flutes do give a pleasantly woody sound, but you feel the recording engineers had to work hard to catch their altogether quieter tone. The antique string instruments were clearly even harder to deal with, and at times you can barely hear them at all.
Nonetheless, this is an absolutely superb DVD. Its main strengths are Harnoncourt’s intense commitment and a stunning performance by Kurt Equiluz as the Evangelist — his music is written very high, but he delivers it with a compelling incision. Jesus is sung by a bass, Robert Holl. There are various other “characters” — most notably Peter and Pilate.
The twin choruses are of adult males and boys respectively. The boys (the Tolzer Knabenchor) are fabulous, hurling themselves with expressively nodding heads into the role of the angry crowd calling for Christ’s crucifixion. Their frantic cries of “Jesus of Nazareth! Jesus of Nazareth!” have been haunting me in my sleep. There are also two boy soloists, of which the older is the better.
Most fascinating, though, is the nature of John’s narrative. He has always provided a different perspective from the other three evangelists, and Bach seems to have sensed this and come up with something original to match his vividly observed, personal account.
This is the finest classical DVD I’ve seen for a long time. Note when browsing for this item that the cover gives the work’s German name, Johannes-Passion.
Modernism in music had many summits. They’re all forbidding, but some are more accessible than others. Bartok’s six string quartets remain central items in the quartet repertory, but they do benefit from some explication. This is provided on an excellent product from Decca (DVD release 2006) in which members of the Takacs Quartet talk about and play quartets 2, 3 and 6.
First they introduce Bartok’s quartets in general, commenting on the Mongolian and North African influences, for instance, and saying that their own intention is to humanize what they thought of as difficult music on first acquaintance. The result is a DVD that’s educational while at the same time offering extremely fine performances of the three featured works.
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