J.S. Bach: Matthaus Passion

The audio version of Jonathan Miller’s ground-breaking production for TV of Bach’s great sacred drama.
Staged and theatrical versions of sacred and liturgical works are now relatively commonplace, but when the BBC first screened this production of the St Matthew Passion in 1994, it was regarded as a daring enterprise. The production was first staged live at St Luke’s in Chelsea, the year before its transfer to the small screen, and filmed at St George’s Brandon Hill in Bristol.
Broadcast on Good Friday by the BBC, it became a fixture of the corporation’s Passiontide output for some years, and has continued to
enjoy an afterlife online and on DVD, with its enduring values of sobriety, intimacy and simple expressiveness not only laying down the gauntlet for subsequent producers and directors but proving to outlast some of its more eccentric and ephemeral successors.
One primary reason for the durability of Miller’s production on film was its high musical values. Paul Goodwin had trained as an oboist but at this stage in his career he was beginning to take up a career in conducting that would lead him to direct the English Concert and many other frontline early-music ensembles as well as chamber and symphony orchestras.
On this occasion he conducted a freelance ensemble of vocal and instrumental colleagues with whom he enjoyed a long working relationship, and their thorough familiarity with the idiom and detail of the Passion shines through in the poise of the arias, the energy of the choruses and the text-centred expressiveness of the chorales.
The nature of Miller’s staging required it to be staged in the round, and this intimacy transfers readily to the audio recording of the film which is presented here with booklet notes by Goodwin tracing the special background to the recording.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

• Bach, J S: St Matthew Passion, BWV244