St John Passion, at St John's Smith Square, SW1
Telegraph Geoffrey Norris
Easter 2002

APTLY contemplative for Good Friday, this performance of Bach's St John Passion had a similar cast of singers to the one that recently took part in Deborah Warner's staged and costumed version at English National Opera, with Mark Padmore as the Evangelist, Paul Whelan as Christus and Gillian Keith in the solo arias for soprano. There was the same conductor, too, in Stephen Layton, but the music's impact was all the more immediate here through being able to express itself directly, without the additional layer of a producer's interpretation.

Layton, with his first-rate choral group Polyphony, has made something of a tradition of giving Bach's Passions at St John's during Holy Week, and his experience tells him that it is possible to dramatise the music from within. Indeed, in Christ's trial scene, for example, Bach invested the writing with such tension and vigour that it needs only a performance as taut and crisply dovetailed as this one to find its seething theatricality and touching humanity. Switching swiftly between the Evangelist's narrative, the chorus's frenzied interjections and the declarations of Christus and Pilate (Thomas Guthrie), the whole scene here had a nervous cut and thrust, heightened by Layton's pliable pacing of the music and the fine-tuning of his choral forces.

There were just the odd occasions, in some of the solos, where speeds seemed too brisk, so that they sounded breathless rather than urgent, but in general the sprightly rhythmicality of the performance did not detract from its meditative spirituality. Mark Padmore is a seasoned Evangelist, and recognised the potential here for varying his tone, his articulation and his shaping of line to heighten the implications of the text.

Gillian Keith sang the soprano arias with clarity and poignant tenderness. Finnur Bjarnason, fresh from his recent performances in Handel's Ariodante at ENO, sang his tenor arias with ringing ardour, and Andrew Foster-Williams brought profound thoughtfulness to his arioso "Betrachte, meine Seel" and the aria "Mein teurer Heiland".

In lightness of texture, the Academy of Ancient Music testified to the advantages of period performance practice, its sonority well-proportioned to the choral and solo singing.

If there were some scrawny and questionably pitched passages when individual string instruments alone were providing the accompaniment, there was, in compensation, some delightfully fluent flute-playing in the soprano aria "Ich folge dir gleichfalls" that emphasised this performance's acute awareness of Bach's sensitivity to his solemn subject.

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