[CLASSICAL MUSIC] Rilling Bach with a passion

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The most enjoyable concert I’ve been to in Taiwan was in 2008. It was the first ever performance here of Bach’s B Minor Mass, one of the greatest masterpieces of world music. It was conducted by the German-born Bach expert Helmuth Rilling and performed by the youthful Evergreen Symphony Orchestra (長榮交響樂團) and the Taipei Philharmonic Chorus (台北愛樂合唱團), plus soloists. I thought I’d never hear anything as wonderful again. But the unbelievably good news is that Rilling is back, and due to lead the same forces in a performance, also a first here, of Bach’s St John Passion this weekend.

It’s being billed as the 2010 Taipei Bach Festival (2010台北巴赫音樂節), but is in reality a nine-day immersion in the glories of the 1724 work, known in German as the Johannes-Passion. Rilling is holding four master classes in the art of conducting Baroque music, each dedicated to one of the Passion’s four sections. Aspiring young conductors will have the chance of rehearsing with the participants, and then Rilling will conduct a performance of the whole thing in the National Concert Hall on Sunday.

The preliminary rehearsal concerts, which are open to the public and likely to be of exceptional interest, have already started. The third takes place today at 7.30pm in the Recital Hall of the Chang Yung-fa Foundation Building, Evergreen’s center of operations and the former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) headquarters. The last will be at 1.30pm tomorrow at the same place. The concluding concert is in Taipei’s National Concert Hall on Sunday at 7:30pm.

It’s assumed Bach wrote four Passions, one based on each of the four evangelists, but only two survive — Matthew and John. They were written to be performed on Good Friday in St Thomas’ Lutheran church, Leipzig, where Bach was music director. The St Matthew Passion is generally regarded as the greater of the two, but the John work has exceptional interest, and is, though shorter, more dramatic than the Matthew.

John has always been seen as the odd man out among the four gospel writers. Matthew, Mark and Luke tell more or less the same story, but John sets out to describe things the others don’t include. He refers to himself as “the disciple Jesus loved,” and there are unusual elements as well.

Bach’s depiction of the story of Jesus’ capture, trial, crucifixion and burial (but not his resurrection, which was a story for Easter Sunday) is as vivid as John’s narration of it. John was present at the key events, notably when, after Jesus’ arrest, he went with Simon Peter to the palace of the High Priest (with whom he had some special contact) and Peter was stopped at the door and asked if he wasn’t one of Jesus’ disciples, leading to his denying Jesus three times before the cock crowed. Other details are very precise, too, such as the police and servants making a charcoal fire in the High Priest’s courtyard because it was so cold, and Peter’s earlier cutting off the right ear of the High Priest’s servant Malchus. John is also the disciple who took responsibility for the care of Mary, Jesus’ mother, after his death. He often refers to this special relationship, usually with a kind of modest understatement.

Bach’s setting features soloists taking the parts of the Evangelist (John), Jesus, Pilate and Peter, plus others who don’t represent any particular character, and a chorus that sometimes stands in for the crowd baying for Christ’s blood, and is sometimes a group of anonymous commentators singing the non-Biblical hymns and meditations that punctuate the narration. (One, comparing Christ’s back after his flagellation to the red sky at sunset, is sometimes cut as indelicate, but if Bach saw fit to set it to music we should surely give it the benefit of the doubt).