Pärt: Passio (Concert Review - The Financial Times, 2001)
Passions abound at Easter - chiefly, but not exclusively, Bach's, after the gospel accounts. On Sunday I heard Bach's St Matthew in the Barbican Hall, from Paul McCreesh's Gabrieli Consort and Players; a few days earlier, I'd heard Arvo Part's austere 1982 Passio after St John, performed by the Hilliard Ensemble, Stephen Layton and his Holst Singers, at St John's, Smith Square. Both performances were beautifully prepared, but I wondered whether they shouldn't have traded venues.
McCreesh is a proselytiser for the Bach "purist" tendency. Not only for period instruments and playing styles, but also for the idea that since there's no evidence that Bach ever had more than a quartet of singers at his disposal for his church works, the long tradition of grand choral Bach is mistaken.
Suppose it to be true that his St Matthew Passion had its first performance, in Leipzig's Thomas-Kirche, with just eight singers and two small orchestras. Having heard Bach cantatas in that little church, I agree that a slimmed-down St Matthew might sound at its best there; but would he have wanted it played on that modest scale in the Barbican Hall? The McCreesh performance lacked nothing in style or despatch, but it missed out on musical weight. In the rich, churchy acoustic of St John's, we might have felt no loss at all.
His perpetual up-tempi were a nuisance. McCreesh holds the big amateur chorus tradition guilty of dragging Bach unconscionably, but he over-corrects. As conducted by him, the great opening and closing choruses seemed not only light but lightweight, unaware of the momentous things they should communicate. In other numbers he and his soloists, both vocal and instrumental, revealed fresh energy in the writing; but others - particularly the soprano's "Ich will dir mein Herze schenken" and the bass's "Mache dich, mein Herze" - sounded implausibly rushed, woodwinds quacking frantically to keep up.
That said, the Gabrieli's rendition was still full of rewards. Fastidious chamber-playing from both the orchestras and their soloists; with his singers McCreesh compromised a little, letting his four leads, male and female, catch their breath while eight others took the chorales and most of the choruses (and of course he begged the question whether Bach ever had women sing his church-music, instead of boys and male altos). Above all, Mark Padmore's immaculate, piercingly expressive performance as the Evangelist and Sarah Connolly's radiant sobriety in the alto arias made the performance memorable.
Where Bach used not only St Matthew's account of the Passion in the Evangelist's impassioned voice, but freehand arias to express intense personal reactions to the events, Part's Passio sets only St John's text, all in recitative - and in a Latin version, as if to insist that it's an archaic object of reverence. The self-abnegating composer denies himself almost every compositional advantage. His language is restricted to a modal A minor, and strictly linear in a narrow range; no harmonic development, though the criss-crossing of the voices scores the odd piquant dissonance (there is a splurge of irrational dissonances at just one place). Part sets the dramatic events hardly at all, only the sacred text, word by word by word in doggedly measured rhythms.
The Hilliard-and-Holst performance was cool and near-faultless, with the rare lapse from true pitch thrown into unfair relief by perfect tuning everywhere else. In this company John Potter's fine, anxious Pilate sounded positively operatic, a man apart. Part is a composer of formidable means, who has chosen to employ them in the service of a very eastern Orthodox God; you can take that or leave it.
David Murray