Bach: St John and St Matthew Passions – Suzuki

BIS has finally done the sensible thing and put Masaaki Suzuki’s two Bach passions into a single boxed set, priced as if it were three discs rather than five. Anyone who has been dithering about which St. Matthew Passion to buy, or has simply not gotten around to the St. John, no longer has an excuse.

I have lived with Suzuki’s St. John Passion since it first appeared. The opening chorus still does what it did the first time I heard it — that swaying, almost seasick ostinato in the winds, over which the choir enters not with grandeur but with dread. Suzuki gets an anguish out of this music that eludes most of his period-instrument rivals, Herreweghe included, and Herreweghe’s account is no small thing. Twenty-one players. A choir of twenty. Bach’s own forces, more or less, and you feel the difference: every entrance has weight, nothing is smudged.

Suzuki uses the 1749 version, the last one Bach made of a work he kept tinkering with for a quarter century. Wisely, Suzuki tucks the three discarded 1725 arias into an appendix rather than forcing them back into the narrative, where they’d only clutter what is otherwise a lean, taut dramatic structure.

Gerd Türk’s Evangelist deserves a paragraph of his own. He is one of the few tenors on record — Pears excepted, in a very different idiom — who makes the recitative the emotional spine of the piece rather than mere connective tissue. His narration of the scourging has a chill to it that goes beyond word-painting. You hear an actual storyteller losing his composure.

And then there is Yoshikazu Mera. I confess I did not expect much from a countertenor in a role of this kind. Too many countertenors sound like they’re apologizing for being there. Mera isn’t apologizing for anything. “Von den Stricken meiner Sünden” unfolds with a kind of grave tenderness, and “Es ist vollbracht” — well. It is finished, indeed. After that aria you almost don’t want the piece to continue; nothing that follows can match it, and nothing does, quite, though the final chorus tries valiantly.

Peter Kooij’s Christus is dark-grained, unhurried, dignified without a trace of sanctimony, arguably the best on disc since Fischer-Dieskau, and considerably less mannered. Ingrid Schmithusen is the one soloist who doesn’t quite live in this rarefied company. Her tone is pretty but a little studied, lacking the specific gravity everyone around her seems to have found.

The St. Matthew, recorded after, had a harder road. It always does — this is repertoire crowded with classic accounts, from Klemperer’s granite-hewn monument (heresy to still love it, I do) down through Gardiner’s spring-loaded urgency. Suzuki’s version won’t dethrone anybody’s favorite, but it is far finer than its comparative neglect suggests.

Here the forces expand, appropriately: double choir, double orchestra, the antiphonal writing given real spatial separation on this disc. You can hear the two groups conversing, not just coexisting. Tempos run broad, unhurried, occasionally to the point where a listener used to more headlong accounts may shift in the seat. But the breadth pays dividends in the great turba choruses, and in the chorales, which unfold with an almost unbearable patience.

Robin Blaze is the real find here. His countertenor has none of the hooty, disembodied quality that afflicts the fach. This is a warm, grounded voice, entirely human, and his arias throughout carry real weight of feeling rather than mere prettiness. Nancy Argenta, alas, is the weak link Suzuki couldn’t quite paper over. “Blute nur, du liebes Herz!” wants a soprano who can float above the anguish; Argenta reaches for it and you hear the reaching. It’s not disqualifying. It’s just the one place in five discs where the illusion of effortlessness breaks down.

Kooij returns as Jesus and is, if anything, even better than in the St. John: more vulnerable, more human-scaled, the words “Eli, Eli, lama asabthani” delivered with a starkness that needs no interpretive underlining.

Taken as a whole, the St. John here stands with the best ever recorded, full stop. The St. Matthew is very fine, a notch below its sibling mostly through unlucky casting in one role, and would sit near the summit of available versions were it not for that single reservation. Together, at this price, the set is close to unbeatable.