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Why was Bach, a composer of such powerful dramatic instincts, never drawn to opera? We really don’t know.
Yet the Berlin Philharmonic’s magnificent performance of the “St. Matthew Passion” on Tuesday night at the Park Avenue Armory, with the Berlin Radio Choir, the Boy Choristers of St. Thomas Church in New York and a cast of inspired vocal soloists, conducted by Simon Rattle, showed why Bach chose other ways to tell stories through music.
This performance essentially recreated the acclaimed semi-staged “St. Matthew Passion” that Mr. Rattle presented in 2010 at the Philharmonie, the orchestra’s home hall. It was directed by Peter Sellars, who, in a note for the armory’s performance, explained that Bach wrote his “St. Matthew Passion” not as a concert work or a theater piece, but as a “transformative ritual reaching across time and space.”
In other words, the long, daunting passion is a ritualized form of participatory theater. Bach wrenches you out of your comfort zone as an audience member and pulls you into this story of faith and doubt, trust and betrayal, community and mob chaos. All of these qualities came through in the searing, sublime performance on Tuesday, the first of two, bringing to an end a mini-residency in New York for the Berlin Philharmonic, which had already played four concerts at Carnegie Hall.
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This “St. Matthew Passion,” an ambitious offering of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, was presented within the vast space of the armory’s Drill Hall on a stage of intersecting wood platforms specially designed to mimic the in-the-round layout of the Philharmonie. The audience was in tiers of seats surrounding the stage. Sometimes chorus members took places among the audience. A man sitting quietly near you would turn out to be the singer portraying Pontius Pilate during the trial of Jesus. I have seldom felt so much a participant in the musical drama of this staggering masterpiece. For Bach, it must have been more compelling to create his own kind of ritualized theater than to write an opera, which, in comparison, may have struck him as too ordinary. Perhaps for Bach, the opera genre was too presentational, almost like a spectator sport.
The only props onstage were a few wooden boxes, including a long rectangular one that later served as a table for the Last Supper, a tomb for Jesus and more. Even as the audience was walking in, the superb tenor Mark Padmore, singing the Evangelist (the part he performed in the 2010 Berlin performance recorded live on DVD), sat on a box, sunk in thought, looking exhausted already. The Evangelist was about to relate the most famous story ever told, as he has many times before. Perhaps he dreads going through it again, but this is his charge, and he knows it. All this came across before Mr. Padmore had sung a note.
Mr. Rattle, following precedent, divided the orchestra into two groups on opposite sides of the stage; he did the same for the chorus, whose members performed from memory and were dressed, like the orchestra players, in plain black slacks and shirts. (Simon Halsey is the ensemble’s expert chorus master.) With the first chorus, “Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen” (“Come, daughters, help me lament”), one group of chorus singers, sitting in rows just above the stage, began pleading for help. Members of the other group, slumped atop small boxes near the orchestra, seemed confused as they shouted back Bach’s exclamations of “Sehet” (“See him!”) and “Wen?” (“Whom?”).
The theological message of the passion was made real and immediate in this performance: Jesus gave his life for us, his followers believe. He takes on our sins, carries the cross, leaves us in awe-struck devotion but wracked with guilt. How did this happen? What was our role? This spiritual question pervades Bach’s passion and usually comes through in a good performance. But this one clobbered you with it.
During that first chorus, the boy choristers stood in a row overlooking the stage as they sang the phrases of the gentle chorale tune that arise from the complex choral writing and instrumental busyness. That they seemed fidgety enhanced the sweetness of their singing. Before long, they were bustling around the hall to sing in other areas.
When Mr. Padmore began the narrative, taken from the Gospel of Matthew, he sang with penetrating sound and ethereal beauty, though pain was mixed into the purity of his voice. As he told the story, he often assumed the persona of Jesus. The actual Jesus was the baritone Christian Gerhaher, who brought mellow sound and refinement to his performance. This was Jesus as an earnest Everyman, which poignantly humanized the character.
The mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena was moving from her first aria, “Buss und Reu” the expression of a believer hoping that her repentant tears will heal her beloved Jesus. Ms. Kozena’s plush singing was touched with sensuality, a quality made more explicit by the way she massaged the burdened, sore shoulders of Mr. Padmore’s Evangelist as she sang Bach’s yearning phrases. The soprano Camilla Tilling brought bloom and richness to her arias; the tenor Topi Lehtipuu looked and sounded like an impressionable young man who could easily have been drawn into the band of disciples.
The bass-baritone Eric Owens was overwhelming in his scenes. When he sang the intense aria expressing a willingness to take up the cross and drink the cup for his savior (“Gerne will ich”), it seemed that, finally, here was someone actually ready to do it. The seated choristers cowered and hid their faces, as if hoping this call to action might go away.
At the end, in the great final chorus, the singers say they will sit down in tears and call to Jesus in the tomb. Mr. Sellars takes that image literally. The choristers sat on the stage, then slowly got up and gathered around the tomb until they were huddled together. When the music stopped, they faced out, almost glaring, as if daring the audience. There was silence in the hall for quite a while, until the house lights dimmed and an enormous ovation began.
But, think of all the work, expense and construction for just two festival performances. This “St. Matthew Passion” could have run for two weeks.