Pichon is also not afraid to introduce some expressive hairpins (for instance in the chorale interjections in the tenor arietta O Schmerz) that lend an almost Romantic air to certain passages. Subtle echo effects, here and elsewhere, bring variety to the texture perhaps a distant connection to the heritage of the motets is at work here, too. Pichon contrasts the St Matthew with the “grabbing by the scruff of the neck” of the more directly theatrical St John both he and his sensitive Evangelist Julian Prégardien refer in the sleeve notes to their desire to avoid the excesses of melodrama which they see in the more theatrical Passions of Bach’s contemporaries, and more recently in Mel Gibson’s controversial film The Passion of the Christ. There’s a muted sound to the opening chorus the voices’ first entry slides into the orchestral texture rather than making its presence immediately felt. Not only is the antiphonal legacy apparent in the use of two opposed choirs and orchestras, but there’s a sense throughout the performance that Pichon is approaching even this intimidatingly-proportioned work with half an eye on those motets as his reference-point. That recording was on my mind again as I listened to Pichon’s long-awaited, and long-prepared, account of the St Matthew Passion. $ Ī few years ago I was impressed by Ensemble Pygmalion’s thoughtful recording of Bach’s six motets, which saw conductor Raphaël Pichon tease out the ancestry that helped shape them, all the way back to Venetian cori spezzati works by Giovanni Gabrieli.
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