Bach: St Matthew Passion by Vaughan Williams

Some documents belong more to history than to the catalog of recommended recordings, and this reissue is one of them.

Vaughan Williams led the St Matthew Passion at Leith Hill Festival every year from 1931 almost until the end of his life. This tape, made five months before he died in August 1958, is the last surviving evidence of that annual rite. Whatever its sonic limitations — and there are some — nothing can diminish its documentary weight. We hear one great composer inhabiting the mind of another. That happens rarely enough on records to justify tolerating a few rough edges in the engineering.

Christopher Finzi and Noel Taylor did the taping, and the results are honest rather than glamorous: clean enough in the choral tuttis, thinner and more exposed when a single voice steps forward. The Dorking Halls acoustic gives the soloists nowhere to hide. Eric Greene’s Evangelist is lean, urgent, almost conversational in its narrative pacing; Gordon Clinton’s Jesus has a grave, unforced dignity, sung rather than intoned, which was very much the English choral tradition of the period. Pauline Brockless and Nancy Evans bring the softer arias what warmth they can, though the microphones do them few favors. None of this is glamour singing. It is testimony.

The edition is Elgar-Atkins, sung in English. He cut a dozen numbers outright, four of them arias, and he was unapologetic about it. “Mechanical completeness,” he called the alternative. This was never going to be a museum reconstruction. It was shaped for a particular chorus, a particular hall, a particular community of listeners who stood — he insisted on it — for the Last Supper scene.

And the rendition itself is extraordinary, in ways that have nothing to do with polish. The choral singing is huge, slow, granitic — tempos that a HIP director today would find unthinkable, rallentandos stretched to the edge of collapse, then sudden accelerandos flung in to sharpen the drama. By any modern metric this ought to sound ponderous. It does not. Eric Gritton’s piano continuo alongside William Cole’s organ is an odd, very English hybrid. You won’t find it in Suzuki or Herreweghe. Yet it works, filling out the recitatives with a plainness that suits the whole enterprise.

Vaughan Williams’s beat, by all accounts, was vague — he peered at his players over his spectacles rather than conducting them in any conventional sense. David Martin and Vera Kantrovitch, leading the orchestra, must have held things together through sheer familiarity with the yearly ritual. And somehow the imprecision doesn’t register as sloppiness on the tape. It registers as trust.

Compare this with Klemperer’s monumental 1961 recording, or Richter’s granite-hewn Munich account, or, further back, Mengelberg’s wildly romantic 1939 Concertgebouw performance, and this Dorking Passion holds its own not through technical achievement but through sincerity of utterance. It isn’t a Bach album you reach for first. It may not be one you reach for often. But it is one that, once heard, you don’t forget.