Pärt: Passio (Concert Review - The Times, 2001)

St John's is the most direct of the Passions, some would say the most tendentious: a couple of years ago there was a great kerfuffle following Deborah Warner's operatic production of Bach's version at ENO, where the dramatised, Englished narrative made it uncomfortably clear exactly where the evangelist was placing the blame for Jesus's fate. It makes you thankful for the general irreligion of the English, and the fact that we like our music in a safely foreign, or at least archaic, language to veil its more uncompromising messages.

There seemed little danger of anti-fascist demonstrations breaking out in Smith Square at Arvo Pärt's meditation on the same text, given that it is in Latin and about as uninflammatory as it is possible to be. A devotional 70 minutes of repeating modal motifs may not sound like everyone's cup of tea, but this sparely beautiful music, closer to Indian ragas than any European form outside the litanies of the medieval church, carries a conviction that becomes clear as time passes. Pärt's attitude to harmony is clear from the first chords, a succession of massive choral suspensions over a thunderous organ pedal, the music coming into focus on a minor triad and then continuing past it to end on the kind of adjacent-note discord that pervades the score. The part of the Evangelist is sung by a quartet (Mary Seers, David James, Rogers Covey-Crump and Gordon Jones), and obeys its own logic: beginning with a slender baritone line hovering around the first and fourth of the aeolian scale, then joined by the other voices and a quartet of instruments whose musical lines reflect and follow the first. The sound waxes and fades throughout the piece. So much for rocket science. It is the accidental harmonies of these measured lines, set off against the Orthodox vehemence of the choruses and the even more serene monotones of Jesus's music that bring a mesmeric power.

The Hilliard Ensemble under Stephen Layton were as note-perfect as ever, the Holst Singers absolutely focused in attack, phrasing and intonation in this demanding music. Nicholas Gedge's solid Christ was the point around which everything revolved, and John Potter as Pilate - a sympathetic, hounded figure whose plaintive music alone reflects the changing situation - provided a human angle. The final chord is the more affecting for being the only major triad in the piece, and caps a work of quietly powerful spirituality.

Robert Thicknesse