St. Matthew Passion – Iván Fischer

There is something almost perverse about the persistence of Palm Sunday as an occasion for the St. Matthew Passion in Amsterdam. Mengelberg started it, famously, back in 1899, and by the time he led his last, over-Romanticized, cut-riddled account in 1939 — preserved, oddly enough, for posterity — the tradition had calcified into something like civic ritual. The Concertgebouw players still show up. The chorus still assembles. And somehow, even after a century of changing fashions in Bach rendition, the piece still finds new things to say.

This traversal, filmed on Good Friday and Palm Sunday of 2012, arrives at a moment when the period-instrument crowd had more or less won the argument, at least in the seminar rooms. Which makes it worth saying plainly: none of that seems to matter here. The band plays on modern strings, reduced to chamber-scaled forces, with only a gamba and a pair of recorders imported for period color, and the effect is not compromise but conviction. I went in ready to be tolerant. I came out actually moved.

Credit the woodwinds above all. The oboist who shapes the obbligato in “Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen” plays with a reediness that never curdles into astringency — every phrase breathes, nothing is forced. And the solo flute under Maria Espada’s “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben” achieves that peculiar ghostliness Bach seems to have wanted for this aria, where the Passion narrative simply… stops, suspended, and a soprano sings of a love that requires no trumpets, no drums, nothing but breath and string tone. Espada’s silvery, slightly veiled timbre suits the aria’s strange interiority. She doesn’t oversell it. Wise.

Ingeborg Danz is the singer to hear on this set, full stop. Her “Erbarme dich” — that violin-and-alto duet that has undone singers far more celebrated than she — unfolds with an ache that never tips into sentimentality. Line, breath control, that dark contralto color that seems bred specifically for Bach: she has it all, and the solo violinist matches her, spinning out the obbligato with an almost vocal legato, bow arm loose, vibrato judiciously rationed. I have heard this movement reduce audiences to genuine tears — Kathleen Ferrier did it, decades ago, in a very different idiom — and Danz belongs in that lineage, different means, same devastation. Her “Buß und Reu” is nearly as fine.

Peter Gijsbertsen has the misfortune of drawing “Geduld, wenn mich falsche Zungen stechen,” one of the least grateful tenor arias Bach ever wrote — a real vocal obstacle course, awkwardly lying, thanklessly exposed — and if he sounds pressed near the top, well, so does everyone who attempts it honestly. Forthright is the right word. He doesn’t fake ease he doesn’t have.

Which brings us to the Evangelist, the role on which any St. Matthew ultimately turns. Mark Padmore has by now more or less defined this part for a generation — his diction is immaculate, his sense of narrative pacing unerring, each recitative a small drama of inflection rather than mere note-values observed. He knows exactly when to let the German consonants bite and when to let a phrase simply dissolve into silence. Peter Harvey’s Christus, meanwhile, carries the dignity the role demands without tipping into monumentality — there’s a wounded humanity in his phrasing of “Eli, Eli, lama asabthani” that avoids the marble-statue Christus so many bass-baritones default to.

Does this unseat Herreweghe, or Gardiner, or Suzuki, in the crowded field of modern Matthäus recordings? Probably not, and I doubt it wants to. What it offers instead is proof — welcome, overdue proof — that modern instruments, played with this much stylistic intelligence, can still make an emotionally complete case for this score. Reclaim, that’s the word. Bach doesn’t belong exclusively to gut strings and low pitch, whatever the purists insist. On the evidence here, he never did.