Good Friday, 1724. Bach had been in Leipzig barely a year, still finding his footing in a city that would prove alternately congenial and maddening for the remaining quarter-century of his life. Into that fraught, politically charged atmosphere he released the St. John Passion — raw, violent, compressed, nothing like the vast theological architecture he would construct four years later in the St. Matthew Passion. The Johannes-Passion has always struck me as the more unsettling work precisely because of its urgency, the way the Gospel of John hurls you through the Passion narrative without sentiment, without apology. A performance that forgets this is a performance that has missed the point.
John Butt and the Dunedin Consort have not missed the point.
What Butt has assembled here is something more than a performance of the work — it is a reconstruction of the entire Good Friday Vespers service as it might have been experienced in Leipzig, the Passion itself embedded within a liturgical frame of motets and chorale harmonizations sung by the University of Glasgow Chapel Choir under James Grossmith. The effect is disorienting at first, in the best possible way. You are not settling in for a concert. You are arriving late to something already underway, something that has its own gravity and its own purpose entirely apart from your listening pleasure.
The scholarly rationale behind Butt’s text is laid out in his notes with the kind of lucidity one rarely encounters in this genre — learned without being impenetrable, which is itself an accomplishment. He has followed the Neue Bach-Ausgabe as his foundation while incorporating instrumental revisions Bach made for later performances, constructing what might have been heard at a projected 1739 revival that, as it happened, never occurred. The differences from the familiar performing text are subtle enough that most listeners won’t notice them. But the sensibility behind the choices — the scrupulousness, the refusal to paper over historical uncertainty — permeates the whole enterprise.
The forces are small. Very small. One singer per vocal part for the arias, a chamber ensemble of period instruments, and the Glasgow choir handling the liturgical material surrounding the Passion proper. I know this territory is contested — have known it for decades — and I have no interest in relitigating the one-voice-per-part debate here. What I will say is that my own instincts run toward the middle ground: the lean, flexible choruses of the Monteverdi Choir, or the kind of transparency Karl Ristenpart was achieving with his small Saar Radio forces back in the 1950s, years before anyone was fashionably discussing such things. I have admired Rifkin and Parrott in the abstract while returning, in practice, to recordings with slightly more choral body.
This one has changed my mind about the margins, if not the center.
Nicholas Mulroy’s Evangelist is the key. It always is — the Evangelist is the spine of this work, the consciousness through which we experience everything, and a weak or merely capable tenor in this role leaves the whole structure sagging. Mulroy is neither weak nor merely capable. His voice has a natural brightness that never turns hard, and he manages the recitative with the storyteller’s gift of making you forget you’ve heard these words before. The account of Peter’s denial — the rooster crowing, the eyes meeting — arrives with the shock of something freshly witnessed rather than ritually commemorated.
Matthew Brook brings to Jesus a burnished authority — the bass voice here should sound like judgment itself, inexorable, and Brook does not disappoint. His “Es ist vollbracht” — well, that’s the alto’s aria, not his — but his presence throughout the trial scene before Pilate is commanding without tipping into pomposity, which is a real danger with this music. Robert Davies doubles effectively as both Petrus and Pilatus, no small feat given how different those roles demand a singer to be.
Joanne Lunn’s soprano has a silvery purity that suits the arias beautifully — “Ich folge dir gleichfalls” floats with the right kind of innocent ardor — and Clare Wilkinson’s alto brings warmth and depth to “Es ist vollbracht,” that extraordinary arioso in which Bach seems to compress the entire weight of Christian theology into a few measures of da capo form. Wilkinson doesn’t rush it. She lets it breathe and ache.
The instrumental playing under Butt — who contributes harpsichord and organ preludes to the liturgical frame — is lean and alive, the strings producing that slightly cutting sound on gut strings that gives early Bach performances their particular electricity. The choruses, even with limited forces, land with genuine impact. “Herr, unser Herrscher” — the opening chorus, one of the most arresting curtain-raisers in all of choral music — opens not with the massive wave of the big-choir recordings but with something more like a controlled intensity, a fervor held just barely in check.
Where does this sit in the crowded field? Stephen Layton’s recent Hyperion recording offers a more conventionally complete reading — polished, beautifully sung, presented in the standard concert format that most listeners will find more immediately accessible. John Eliot Gardiner’s 2011 live disc has that particular electricity of the Pilgrimage concerts, risks and all. Both are worth owning. But Butt’s reconstruction does something neither of those does: it insists on the historical context as an interpretive act, not merely an academic exercise. Hearing the Passion emerge from within the liturgy rather than standing alone as a monument changes how you hear it — makes it feel more contingent, more human, more like something that happened rather than something that was composed.
That is no small thing. Essential listening.
