Sunday 8 March 2026
Royal Festival Hall, London
*****
A dramatic and deeply devotional performance, part concert, part religious ritual
The Bach Choir’s 150th Anniversary season, which opened last October with a superb performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, was marked on Sunday with Bach’s St Matthew Passion, part of the Choir’s repertoire since 1894. For nearly a century, the Choir has performed the work at least once a year, starting with the conductor Adrian Boult in 1930 at the Queen’s Hall, then moving to the Royal Albert Hall. For nearly 70 years, the Choir has performed the Passion annually at the Royal Festival Hall, with a short break during the Pandemic. Sunday’s performance was the 177th by the Choir.
According to Katharine Richman’s very helpful programme note, the Choir has usually performed the work on the day of a significant Christian festival associated with the Passion of Christ, such as Passion Sunday, Palm Sunday or Good Friday. For the first time on Sunday it was performed on the Third Sunday of Lent, which is a less important day in the Christian calendar. But this still felt like a deeply religious occasion, partly due to the request that the audience reserve their applause until the very end of the work, and the fact that the soloists all wore sombre clothes. The concert had a devotional, ritualistic feel, enforced by the fact that it started at 11.00 on a Sunday, as Christian services often do; this in itself, together with the long lunch break, has become a ritual for these concerts, dating back to at least 1935. The audience played its part, too, sitting in respectful and sometimes spellbound silence as this most moving of narratives gradually unfolded; there was a real sense of this being a special occasion.
Bach wrote the Passion in German, his native language (see Bach and Luther below for the importance of this), and it wasn’t until 1930 that the Choir began singing it in English. The composer was keen for his work to communicate in the language of his audience, even though, as Richman writes, it has been a challenge to find an English singing version that matches Bach’s rhythms.
On Sunday, Toby Spence told the story in English as the Evangelist, a superb and tireless communicator, with very clear diction. He sang with a light, lyrical tenor with a touch of vibrato, from within the orchestra, joining the continuo players.
The Choir opened the concert after a short and stately instrumental introduction. Early Music performances of the Passion use much smaller forces, but the Choir’s decision to use its traditional large forces was completely vindicated by the precision with which they sang, and maintained a long and worthy tradition. The opening chorus, ‘Come, ye daughters, share my weeping’, illustrated the Choir’s excellent diction and conductor David Hill’s superb shaping of the vocal lines. Spread across the choir seats above the stage, the stereo effect created by the two choirs was an important part of the drama (again, see Bach and the acoustics of St Thomas Church below for the significance of this.) The London Youth Choir stood in the middle and often sang together with the adult singers. But the opening chorus was a chance to hear their soaring legato part, sung with great purity, brightness and precision, contrasting with the more staccato-sounding voices. It would be difficult to find choirs, including professional choirs, that could perform the work better than these.
BACH AND LUTHER
Bach’s St Matthew Passion was first performed in St Thomas’s Church nearly 300 years ago, on Good Friday, 11 April 1727, at the Lutheran Vespers. Around 200 years earlier, it’s thought that Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of All Saints’ Church, Wittenberg, Germany, widely considered the catalyst for the Reformation. Luther’s translation of The Bible into German is thought to have played a crucial role in making it more accessible to the laity. It’s important, therefore, that the text of Bach’s Matthew Passion used a German translation: St Matthew’s Gospel (Chapter 26 and 27) for the narrative, and the work of the German poet Christian Friedrich Henrici (known as Picander) for the reflective arias and choruses.
The bass-baritone Neal Davies played the role of Jesus. A seasoned veteran, Davies won the Lieder Prize at the 1991 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition – 35 years ago – and is still in superb voice. His interpretation was devotional, inward-looking, and thoughtful for much of the first half, reminding us that Christ is often a passive character in this story: the words passion and passive come from the same Latin root (pati to suffer; passivus suffered). His voice was often surrounded by a halo of strings, adding to the profundity of his utterances. As Richman points out, a notable exception to this is in Part Two, where he cried out ‘My God, my God, why has Thou forsaken me’, in an anguished, passionately lyrical voice. After Jesus ‘yielded up the ghost’, there was a profoundly moving silence.
Mezzo soprano Carolyn Dobbin shared Davies’ thoughtful approach: for instance, in her first aria, ‘Grief for sin rends the guilty heart within’, with a lovely running accompaniment from woodwind and chamber organ. Her tone was gently conversational with expressive body movements.
We soon heard from soprano Lucy Crowe, who had excelled as Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte in Manchester a week earlier. In her aria ‘Break Open, Thou Loving Heart’, she sang with subtle passion, her creamy voice lovingly caressing the words as she immersed herself completely in the music.
There was more, luxury casting in the baritone Christopher Purves, who stunningly sang the title role in Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle so memorably in Manchester recently. As well as singing the bass arias (of which more later), he sang the smaller roles of Judas, a robust Peter, and an operatic High Priest, and Pilate, communicating urgently with the audience in these character roles.
A highlight of Part One was when the tenor Benjamin Hulett and the Choir sang ‘O grief! how throbs his heavy-laden breast’/’O saviour, why must all this ill befall me?’, the soft-grained warmth of the Choir contrasting with Hulett’s gently operatic voice.
And there was a moment of high drama when the two female soloists sang the lilting duet, ‘Behold, my Saviour now is taken’ while the Choir sang of ‘lightnings and thunders’, superbly articulated and powerful.
BACH AND THE ACOUSTICS OF ST THOMAS CHURCH
According to Professor Trevor Cox of the University of Salford, in his book Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound, the acoustics of St Thomas Church had a profound effect on the composition of Bach’s Passion, ‘Before the Reformation, the priest’s voice took 8 seconds to die away in the church… In the mid-16th century, galleries and drapes were added that muffled the reverberation, dropping the decay time to 1.6 seconds.’ According to Cox, Bach ‘exploited the reverberance to write more intricate music with a brisker tempo. Cox quotes the acoustician Hope Bagenal, the senior acoustician at the Royal Festival Hall, as stating that the insertion of galleries into Lutheran churches such as St Thomas Leipzig was ‘the most important single fact in the history of music because it leads directly to the St Matthew Passion and [Bach’s] B Minor Mass.’ The balconies that faced each other at St Thomas Church also allowed Bach to write for double choir and orchestra, exploiting the stereo effect to heighten the drama of his music.
In the second half, Hulett returned with the recitative ‘He holds his peace’, demonstrating the quality of his lower range, with lovely legato in contrast with the broken-up chords of the orchestra. Reiko Ichise on Viola da Gamba was stunningly virtuosic here.
The orchestral leaders Huw Daniel and Gabriella Jones provided superb solos in the arias ‘Have Mercy, Lord, in me’ (the renowned aria, Erbarme Dich, mein Gott) for mezzo soprano and the bass aria ‘Give, O give me back my saviour.’
It felt as if the Earth had stopped turning and time was suspended as Lucy Crowe sang her intensely moving aria, ‘For love my Saviour now is dying’, accompanied by high woodwind solos. And there was a remarkable moment as Purves briefly broke down during his recitative describing the ‘evening hour of calm and rest’ after Jesus’ death. Conductor David Hill gently put a hand on Purves’ shoulder in a subtle gesture of humanity.
But Part Two belonged to the Choir, often singing now without scores, adding to the drama as they faced the audience. Their interjections in the scene with Pilate were perfectly controlled. They sang their immensely complex running lines in the chorus ‘He saved others’ with accurate aplomb. Elsewhere, they were suitably mournful and tender, with excellent blend and dynamics. It was appropriate, therefore, that they brought the concert to an end with the final chorus, ‘We bow our heads in tears and sorrow.’ Hill let his hands drop slowly, and after the silence was broken, this spellbinding performance was honoured with a standing ovation.
Repertoire
JS Bach St Matthew Passion
Performers
Toby Spence Evangelist
Neal Davies Christ
Lucy Crowe Soprano
Carolyn Dobbin Mezzo soprano
Benjamin Hulett Tenor
Christopher Purves Baritone
The Bach Choir
London Youth Choir
Florilegium director Ashley Solomon
Huw Daniel. Gabriella Jones leaders
Philip Scriven Organ Continuo
David Hill conductor
Sources
Cox, T., Sonic Wonderland: A Scientific Odyssey of Sound (The Bodley Head Ltd, 2014)
Richman, K., The Bach Choir and the St Matthew Passion (Programme Note, 2026)
Read on…
Bach in Leipzig
Lucy Crowe performs Mozart in Manchester
Christopher Purves as Duke Bluebeard in Manchester
The Bach Choir in Mahler 8
