Bach's St John Passion Bach Collegium Japan

Tue 10 Mar, Hall Mar, 10 Tue Bach’s St John Passion Bach Collegium Japan Tue 10 Mar 7.30pm Barbican Hall Part of Barbican Presents 2019–20 Bach’s St John Passion Bach’s 1 Marco Borggreve Marco Important information Tue 10 Mar, Hall Mar, 10 Tue When does the I’m running late! Please… concert start Latecomers will be Switch any watch and finish? admitted if there is a alarms and mobile The concert begins at suitable break in the phones to silent during 7.30pm and finishes at performance. the performance. about 9.50pm, with a 20-minute interval. Please don’t… Use a hearing aid? Need a break? Take photos or Please use our induction You can leave at any recordings during the loop – just switch your time and be readmitted if performance – save it hearing aid to T setting there is a suitable break for the curtain call. on entering the hall. in the performance, or during the interval. Looking for Looking for Carrying bags refreshment? the toilets? and coats? Bars are located on Levels The nearest toilets, Drop them off at our free -1, G and 1. Pre-order including accessible cloakroom on Level -1. interval drinks to beat the toilets, are located on queues. Drinks are not Levels -1 and 1. There is Bach’s St John Passion Bach’s allowed in the hall. a further accessible toilet on Level G. 2 Welcome to tonight’s performance Tue 10 Mar, Hall Mar, 10 Tue A warm welcome to tonight’s concert, There’s no doubt that the St John is a work of a performance of Bach’s St John great potency, bringing alive the crucifixion Passion given by Bach Collegium story with music that is by turns heart- Japan – which is this year celebrating rending and dramatic. its 30th anniversary – under the We’re delighted to have a stellar line-up group’s founder and director of soloists, led by the Evangelist of James Masaaki Suzuki. Gilchrist and the Jesus of Christian Immler. The St John Passion was for many years It promises to be a powerfully moving regarded as something of a poor relation to evening. I hope you enjoy it. the St Matthew, which was famously revived by Mendelssohn in 1829. But in fact the Huw Humphreys St John had actually been performed seven Head of Music years earlier in a concert given by Carl Friedrich Zelter, Mendelssohn’s teacher. Programme produced by Harriet Smith Bach’s St John Passion Bach’s All information correct at time of printing Advertising by Cabbell (tel 020 3603 7930) 3 St John Passion Bach Collegium Japan Tue 10 Mar, Hall Mar, 10 Tue Tue 10 Mar 7.30pm Barbican Hall J S Bach St John Passion The will be one interval of 20 minutes between Part 1 and Part 2 Bach Collegium Japan Masaaki Suzuki director James Gilchrist tenor (Evangelist) Hana Blažíková soprano Damien Guillon countertenor Zachary Wilder tenor Christian Immler bass-baritone (Jesus) Part of Barbican Presents 2019–20 Bach’s St John Passion Bach’s 4 Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) St John Passion (1724, rev 1725, 1732, 1749) Tue 10 Mar, Hall Mar, 10 Tue Today, it is hard to imagine either of Bach’s two great surviving Passions – What is a Passion? the St Matthew and the St John – ever J S Bach left two complete Passions – the being mistaken for an opera. St Matthew and the St John – and he For many people, believers and agnostics was certainly not alone in writing such alike, attending a Passion performance is a pieces – Handel composed a Brockes vital and meaningful part of Holy Week, an Passion, while Bach’s friend Telemann act often invested with something of the wrote several works in the genre, and sombre reverence of a religious celebration. they were by no means the only figures And sure enough, Bach composed his to do so. But what exactly do we mean Passions to be performed in church as by the term? The word ‘passion’ here part of the liturgy on Good Friday, one of the refers to the Passion of Christ, so it’s a most important days in the church calendar, musical work designed to be performed when the congregation would have also specifically during Holy Week in the endured a gruelling sermon between the Christian calendar – the week leading up work’s two parts. to (but not including) Easter Sunday. It tells Yet, in composing Passions of this particular the story of Christ’s betrayal and death. type, Bach was slotting into a tradition of The idea of such musical settings goes increasingly dramatised musical settings of back to medieval times and continues the Gospel texts relating the events leading to the present day, but for many people to Christ’s crucifixion – a tradition that went the pinnacle was reached by J S Bach in back to early Christian times, but had gained the works he composed for St Thomas’s particular strength in northern Germany Church in Leipzig, with their ideal blend during the previous century. The evolution of drama, pathos and, underpinning from the first chanted Passions to elaborate it all, an undeniable humanity. compositions involving solo singers with named roles, choirs and orchestras certainly shows a strong trend towards the theatrical, as the theologian Christian Gerber recognised when he complained in 1732 that ‘if some of those first Christians should rise, visit our assemblies, and hear such a roaring organ together with so many instruments, I do not believe that they would recognise us as Christians and their successors’. Gerber had also written of an unidentified Passion performance at which ‘all the people were thrown into the greatest St John Passion Bach’s bewilderment … An elderly widow of the 5 Tue 10 Mar, Hall Mar, 10 Tue nobility exclaimed: “God save us, my children! It’s just as if we were at a comic opera”.’ Glossary Nevertheless, while the St John Passion is a Aria A song-like piece for a solo voice strikingly dramatic work (for instance, in its vivid with accompaniment; in Bach’s sacred depiction of Christ’s trial in Part 2), and while music these often offer a moment of the presence in it of urgent recitatives interlaced reflection within a bigger work. with arias and choruses to words adapted from those the poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes and Chorus In the context of the St John others had already furnished for even more and St Matthew Passions Bach uses openly operatic Passions by Keiser, Telemann choruses at key moments in the unfolding and Handel is presumably just the sort of thing drama. They range widely in mood to which Gerber objected, it seems unlikely that, from the dramatic to the consoling. in composing music for his first Good Friday in Leipzig’s St Nicholas Church in April 1724, Recitative Writing for solo voice Bach was actually setting out to be theatrical. that is speech-like in style, used After all, at his appointment the previous May to move the story forwards. to the job of Kantor of St Thomas’s School – a post which carried with it responsibility for organising the music at all Leipzig’s four main churches – Bach’s new employers, the town council, had specifically stipulated that he should ‘so arrange the music that it shall not last too long, and shall be of such a nature as not to make an operatic impression, but rather to incite the listener to devotion’. In fact, the St John Passion is more complicated than that. Bach’s achievement was to devise a work which is more than two hours long, with a detailed and complex yet utterly coherent construction which tells its well-known story in four parallel and mutually supportive strands. At its core is the narrative, the text of the Gospel itself, sung in recitative by a tenor representing the Evangelist, with Christ’s words sung by a bass; in addition, the smaller roles of certain other characters (Peter and Pilate, for instance) are taken by solo voices, while the utterances and exclamations of the crowd are voiced, succinctly but sometimes with almost hysterical intensity, by the chorus. Bach’s St John Passion Bach’s As a foil to this narrative element, there are the episodes provided by the eight arias, in which the action stops and a relevant emotion 6 Tue 10 Mar, Hall Mar, 10 Tue or reaction is explored; these are where the most reflective moments in the Passion are ‘The musical literature to be found, enhanced and coloured by tends to present Bach as accompanying solo instruments, including two violas d’amore in the bass arioso ‘Betrachte, a mastermind exerting meine Seel’’ (No 19) and a viola da gamba (associated in Bach’s time with death) in the uncanny control over his superb alto aria ‘Es ist vollbracht!’ (No 30). creations, but he, too, may The third strand is the meditative and communal element represented by the chorales. have been caught in the These would have been extremely familiar to Bach’s contemporaries, and while their role as labyrinth of his imagination. points-of-entry was probably not literal in the What he gives us – what he sense of the congregation actually joining in, they would certainly have provided listeners perhaps gave himself – is with moments of recognition and identification. a way of coming to terms Finally, there are the great choruses that frame the work like massive structural pillars: with extreme emotion. the first, the very opening movement, is a harrowing depiction of Christ’s agony and He does not console; he humiliation, but one which, at the same time, reminds us that within it is contained commiserates … Bach is his ultimate glory; the second, ‘Ruht no Byzantine deity gazing wohl’ (No 39), is a moving and consoling farewell to Christ’s earthly incarnation.

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