There is something like a group of parishioners who, every Holy Week, congregate in one of the auditoriums in Barcelona to emotionally listen to the story of the Passion of Christ. There are Catholics, there are Protestants… and best of all, there are also agnostics and atheists who enthusiastically attend the ritual. Once a year doesn’t hurt, and after all, The God everyone reveres is Johann Sebastian Bach. This 2023, the Palau de la Música has had the good sense of programming, on consecutive days, the Passion according to Saint Matthew and the Passion according to Saint John, both performed by groups of proven solvency: the first, with The Voice of Light and the Freiburg Baroque; the second, with the Vocal College Gent directed by Again. Attending both has been an unforgettable spiritual experience for many, with excellent musical results.
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Music:
J.S. Bach. -
Interpreters:
Vox Luminis, Freiburger Barockorchester, Collegium Vocale Gent, children’s choir of the Orfeó Català. L. Meunier, P. Herrewege, directors. -
Date:
March 30 and 31. -
Place:
Palau de la Música, Barcelona.
Excellent, although not identical. At 75, Herrewege is still at the forefront and, despite the fact that his movements are limited – often reduced to a slight swaying of the hands with which he seems to say to his musicians something like “go ahead, you know how it goes”. »— prints a personal stamp: that limpid, emotional sound, with a sense of drama that accompanies the progress of the action of the Passion according to Saint John, emphasizing the details of Bach’s rhetoric without losing sight of the whole.
By contrast, the much younger Lionel Meunier, founder of the Vox Luminis group, has embarked on a more innovative, risky project that offers as many lights as shadows. Together with the mythical Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, he proposes a passion according to San Mateo interpreted according to musicological studies that suggest that Bach must have had rather limited numbers of staff when it came to premiering his works. For Meunier, this translates into an orchestra with the minimum essential instruments and a choir that, once divided in two, as required by Bach, is left with only two singers per string —reinforced in the first part by the magnificent singers of the Orfeó Català children’s choir. To better balance the sound, place the woodwinds in the front rows—violins are usually there—and the solo singers in the middle of them. It remains to be seen if Bach worked with so few musicians, but in any case he did it in a church where reverberation was his ally. An ally, of course, that does not exist in the much drier acoustics of a current auditorium, such as the Palau de la Música Catalana.
Meunier sings with the choir and therefore conducts looking at the back of the neck of most performers. Her gesture reaches them “retransmitted” by the most reliable concertmaster Petra Müllejans. In practice, it is Müllejans who conducts in concerts, even though Meunier must do his job in rehearsals. I know, then, of a formula that obliges the exceptional musicians of the Freiburger Barockorchester to do chamber work and be aware at all times of the rest of their colleagues and the singers. This allows for a remarkable display of instrumental and vocal soloists, like Müllejans herself, but there are times when the absence of a director inevitably generates mismatches, insecurities and, above all, a lack of vision of the whole. Just what a director like Herrewege solves.
In both cases, the work of the singers was exceptional. In the Passion according to Saint Matthew, it is worth highlighting the evangelist of Raphael Hoehn and the Jesus of Sebastian Myrusas well as the interventions of the countertenor William Shelton. puzzling the soprano Tóth Zsuzisi, perhaps afflicted with some condition, with excess air in the broadcast and coming to breathe in the midst of the extremely delicate melismas of her aria ‘Aus liebe’. In the passion according to Saint John, Reinoud Van Mechelen brought not a few tears with her evangelist, while the soprano Dorothee Mields and the countertenor Alex Potter They starred in some of the highest moments of the evening.
Definitely, Herrewege’s experience prevailed over Meunier’s experiment, although both managed to give life to some high-level Passions. Unlike, by the way, that the public. Coughing has been back for a long time, mobile phones have never stopped being around, and on these two occasions we must add that particular rush to applaud at the end. Can we really not afford even five or ten seconds of silence after bach?