Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
March 6, 2016
J.S. Bach: St. John Passion
Manfred Honeck, conductor
Sam Helfrich, director
Vocalists:
Martin Lattke, Paul Armin Edelmann, Sunhae Im, Andrey Nemzer, Thomas Cooley,
Lucas Meachem, Alexander Elliott, Jeffrey Klefstad, Amelia D’Arcy, Jonathan MacDonald
The Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh
Bach, Beethoven and Brahms – the classical music triumvirate, the original killer B’s. I have been a huge fan of J.S. Bach’s music since I had the opportunity to sing his B Minor Mass as an undergraduate music student in Cincinnati. Universally acknowledged as a genius, his music is not programmed by symphony orchestras as much as one might think. Performances of his music are the stuff of professional and semi-professional choirs, Renaissance and Baroque Societies and music conservatory ensembles.
The PSO has recently bucked this trend. In April of 2013, harpsichordist Jeannette Sorrell led a chamber orchestra of PSO musicians in performances of the six Brandenburg Concertos. March of last year, Sorrell returned to perform and conduct an assortment of J.S. Bach pieces along with a touch of Vivaldi and Telemann. So I was thrilled to see this season include performances of Bach’s St. John Passion – a contemporarily semi-staged production during the season of Lent – a bonus.
It didn’t work.
I’m aware that the juxtaposition of contemporary scenes and situations against a baroque setting of Christ’s Passion was intended to evoke new realizations, revelations for the audience.
It didn’t work.
First, Bach’s St. John Passion is markedly different from his B Minor Mass or his cantatas. It is significantly less tuneful than the B Minor Mass and an order of magnitude longer than his typical cantata. J.S. Bach was certainly a genius but this doesn’t mean that everything he wrote was of the same quality. This passion simply doesn’t contain enough memorable material to sustain the listener for two-plus hours.
Second, the passion was sung in German (rightly so) while English translations were projected on screens to the left and right of the stage. In order to understand what the vocalists were singing, the audience’s attention was on the translations, not on the staging. Following the staging meant one’s attention was not on the translation. This division of the audience’s attention only served to make connections between the contemporary staging and the music all to difficult to discern.
I should add, that the soloists and Mendelssohn Choir sang wonderfully. Aside from not being able to hear the lute, the orchestra performed equally well.
It was a valiant attempt, but it didn’t work.