Customer Reviews

St John Passion

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La Chapelle Rhenane, the Strasbourg-based virtuoso group of vocal and instrumental musicians under the direction of Benoit Haller, gives us here an intensely dramatic, vividly contemporary, thoroughly musical, chamber version of Bach's Passion According to St. John. This is not a one-voice-to-a-part performance, but rather all vocal and instrumental forces have been reduced to a minimum so that the drama of the text can be intimately yet forcefully projected and the lines of instrumental music clearly inflected and differentiated. By no means is this an austere performance. Rather Haller's musicians force you to pay attention. The pieces in which soloists and chorus interact acquire dramatic immediacy with these reduced forces while maintaining individual differentiation between the lines of say, turba and soloist. Among the soloist it is noteworthy that the Evangelist is marvelously sung by tenor Julien Pregardien, son of the famous tenor, himself a great Evangelist, Christoph Pregardien. All soloists and the reduced choral forces are indeed vocal virtuosos. Some measures are taken at speeds much faster than I have ever heard in a St. John Passion, yet at no time is a note slurred, a line smudged: everything is always clear. The same can be said for the instrumentalists.

A more traditional approach to the St. John Passion, which, like La Chapelle Rhenane's version, attempts to solve some of the textual differences given Bach's various versions of the work, can best be found in Phillipe Herreweghe's extraordinary versionBach: St. John Passion. However, the different, more bracing view of the work given here by Benoit Haller deserves a place on the shelf next to Herreweghe's. It is Bach's genius that there is no one way to his music. As John Eliott Gardiner is showing us in his cantata pilgrimage, Herreweghe in his St. John's, and here Mr. Haller so ably demonstrates, there is endless variety of perspective with which to view the Bach ouvre. Haller gives us a version that seems very right for our time, suffused with human feeling and passion, projecting text in a manner far removed from the pietistic garb that elsewhere can smother it. When it comes to Bach, we are past any orthodoxy.

The recording is clear, natural and wide ranging. The notes are interesting even if the print is small. Text is provided. Highly recommended. Even as a first St. John's.

Half a century later, and the second World War seems to have taught us nothing of the value of human dignity, the world still wracked by wars wrought in the name of race and religion and greed.

Catastrophes are now commonplace, regular spectacles splashed on TV screens and newspapers. Earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, all in the space of a handful of months.

All art has to answer this one question: how do we live? How do we go on in these times?

Benoît Haller's response isn't one of consolation. He exposes the rawness of human agony plainly: listen to the way the continuo grunts and tears into the opening chorus. His response is apocalyptic; through Bach he makes us stare into the pits of our own hopelessness.

All his singers and instrumentalists seem to be in the same sinking boat. They strain and struggle because they sing about life and death.