St Matthew Passion – Koopman

Erato keeps returning to this well, and who can blame them. Ton Koopman’s St. Matthew Passion has been sitting quietly in the catalogue for two decades now, periodically repackaged, and every time I pull it out I’m reminded why it deserves better than to be treated as a budget afterthought alongside the B minor Mass.

Let’s get something out of the way first. This is not a interpretation that will make you weep into your program notes. If you want tears — real, unguarded, Romantic-tinged tears — go find Klemperer, lumbering and magnificent and entirely out of period-practice fashion, or even late Richter if you can stomach the tempi. Koopman offers something else: an account built on momentum, on the conviction that the Passion is architecture before it is emotion. Each recitative leans into the next turba chorus with an almost conversational inevitability. Nothing dawdles.

Is that cold? I don’t think so, though I understand why some listeners hear it that way.

What strikes me, listening again, is how thoroughly the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra avoids the trap of sounding merely correct. This isn’t a gut-string ensemble chasing austerity for its own sake. Koopman’s band has body, warmth even, a cushion of sound that never curdles into the saccharine. The oboes da caccia breathe. The continuo group, alert and quick-witted, seems to anticipate every harmonic shift a half-second before it lands, which gives the recitatives their peculiar sense of forward tilt.

The solo singing is the real glory here, and I’ll say it plainly: Guy de Mey’s Evangelist is one of the finest on disc. He narrates. He doesn’t perform narration, and not every tenor grasps the difference. His diction is immaculate, his tone lean without being thin, and he never once indulges in the kind of hushed, quasi-operatic pathos that makes some Evangelists insufferable after three hours. Peter Kooy’s Christus matches him for dignity; this is a Christus sung with resignation rather than anguish, words given weight through restraint rather than italicized suffering. Together they create something close to equilibrium, neither narrator nor protagonist overshadowing the other, which is rarer than you’d think.

And then there’s Barbara Schlick. Her “Blute nur, du liebes Herz” has an ache to it that’s all the more affecting for being so carefully rationed. She doesn’t spend her emotional capital early. By “Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben” (not on this particular excerpt list, but trust me, it’s there, floating, nearly disembodied) she’s earned every bit of stillness in her voice. Restraint, in her hands, becomes its own kind of intensity.

Compare this to John Butt’s more recent Dunedin Consort account: leaner, more scholarly in its one-voice-per-part conviction, cooler still in some ways despite the reduced forces. Koopman’s version, by contrast, feels almost generous. Big-boned without being bloated. It occupies a middle ground between the old guard (Richter, Karl Münchinger even further back) and the austerity of the historically-minimalist crowd that followed Rifkin’s lead.

Where does that leave a listener today, with Gardiner and Herreweghe and Suzuki all jostling for shelf space? Closer to the top than its vintage and its repackaged, slightly unglamorous presentation might suggest. This isn’t a Matthew Passion that announces its scholarship or its piety. It simply trusts the piece, trusts that Bach, writing for a Leipzig congregation who already knew how the story ended, understood that inevitability can carry its own kind of grief. Koopman seems to have understood that too, a long time before most of his contemporaries caught up.

Not a first choice for those who want catharsis delivered on a plate. But for structural intelligence, for the sheer pleasure of hearing three singers who actually listen to each other, an easy, genuine recommendation.