Schütz: Lukaspassion – Rademann

There is a peculiar austerity to late Schütz that modern ears, raised on the sob and swoon of the Baroque passion tradition running through Bach, find bewildering the first time through. No orchestra. No arias to cushion the drama, no chorales for the congregation to lean on. Just voices, alone, tracing out the old plainchant-derived formulas the way monks might have done four centuries earlier. Schütz was pushing eighty when he wrote the Lukaspassion — an old man, mostly retired, returning deliberately to a style he had spent his whole career moving away from. That alone makes the piece worth sitting with.

Hans-Christoph Rademann and the Dresdner Kammerchor understand the stakes here, and for long stretches this album is the clear-eyed, unsentimental account the score wants. Ludger Rémy’s organ continuo breathes discreetly under the recitative; Hille Perl and Lee Santana, on viola da gamba and theorbo, supply the Sieben Worte with a hushed, resinous glow that never intrudes. The engineering favors bloom over detail — you get a sense of a real room, stone and wood, rather than the dry immediacy some rival labels prefer.

Where the rendition falters is in the placement of expression: too much of it in one place, not enough in another.

Jan Kobow’s Evangelist is a fine, communicative tenor, and normally that would count as a virtue. Not here. Schütz wants the narrator drained of affect, nearly monotone, the vocal line barely rising above a reciting tone except where the text itself forces a gesture — the upward skip at the inscription on the cross is the textbook instance. Kobow can’t quite resist. He leans into dynamics, stretches a phrase, lets the tempo sag when the story turns painful. When the Evangelist reports that Jesus cried out with a loud voice, Kobow obliges by actually singing loudly. It’s dramatically understandable and stylistically wrong, a small thing repeated often enough to become a real interpretive problem. Compare this with the icier, more depersonalized narrations Paul Hillier drew from his tenors in the companion St John and Luke recordings. Those readings can feel cold, even alienating. But they grasp something essential about Schütz’s method, which depends on restraint to make the surrounding drama register at all.

Felix Rumpf’s Jesus fares better: plain, dignified, almost stony, which is precisely right. The soliloquentes generally acquit themselves with the kind of textual sensitivity German choral training instills early and never quite lets go of.

The turbae, though, disappoint. These crowd choruses are where Schütz allows himself real color, the mob’s fury and the shifting temperature of a scene compressed into fifteen or twenty seconds of dense polyphony. Here they arrive politely groomed, blended, a little sleepy. I wanted more bite in the “Crucify him” outbursts, more genuine menace; instead I got choral tone of considerable beauty and not much theater. It’s an odd inversion — the narrator too expressive, the crowd not expressive enough — and it flattens a work that depends on exactly that kind of terraced dynamism to sustain fifty minutes with no instrumental relief.

The shorter Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott and the Sieben Worte fare better, if only because they carry less narrative weight to mismanage. Ulrike Hofbauer’s soprano is bright, focused, entirely without excess vibrato — a sound Schütz himself, trained in Venice under Giovanni Gabrieli and later shadowing Monteverdi’s example from a distance, would likely have recognized as appropriately “modern” for 1660s Dresden even while the Lukaspassion‘s language reaches back toward Gregorian severity.

Does this recording unseat existing versions? Not quite. Hillier’s austerity still strikes me as closer to the composer’s evident intentions, chilly as it sometimes is. Those wanting a plusher, more overtly expressive Schütz might do better with older Kammerchor Stuttgart accounts under Frieder Bernius. Rademann sits somewhere between: well sung, handsomely recorded, admirable in ensemble discipline, but pulled slightly out of shape by an Evangelist who can’t quite stop being a storyteller when Schütz needed him to be furniture.

Worth hearing. Not, in the end, first choice.