Bach St John Passion, Academy of Ancient Music, Cummings, Barbican review - conscience against conformism

In a programme note for the St John Passion at the Barbican, the Academy of Ancient Music’s chief executive called their Easter performances of Bach’s compressed gospel tragedy a “ritual”. You understand why that word claims its place. However, there’s not much consciously liturgical about the AAM’s musical approach.

Authentic their instruments might be, and director Laurence Cummings’s scrutiny of the scores – this time he reverted to Bach’s 1749 iteration, which largely reprises the 1724 original – never lacks scholarly rigour. But the intense chamber drama unfolding in the middle of the big Barbican stage made little effort to replicate a Good Friday service at Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche. 

An hour-long hellfire sermon between the two parts? That would count as a proper “period” performance. Instead, we had a small squad of powerful soloists amid – or at the edge of – the practised and expert Baroque instrumentalists of the AAM, with the 20-strong choir just behind them. This tight physical and visual focus matched a reading that accentuated contrasts of mood and tone as the Evangelist speeds through the story of Jesus’s betrayal, trial and crucifixion. Sombre grandeur took second place here (too much so, perhaps, for some ritual-seekers) to the swift-running, strongly characterised human drama of conscience and conformity, transgression and redemption. Cummings, directing from the harpsichord (pictured above), and the AAM have this work in their musical DNA; so the threat of a blunting familiarity must lurk every time. You would never suspect that: excitement, dismay, dread, horror and precarious consolation raced through their account, always anchored in choral work of quicksilver agility and glinting precision. Fans of relaxed, grandiose, soothing chorales will have to look elsewhere. 

There were even moments when this St John Passion seemed to cry out for a latter-day subtitle: Pontius Pilate, or the Perils of Populism. Not that Nicholas Mulroy’s subtle and expressive Evangelist, or Dingle Yandell’s warmly noble Christus, ever under-performed or failed to make an impact. Rather, from his position at the heart of the ensemble, Jonathan Brown’s conscience-stricken but fatally self-doubting Roman magistrate came to epitomise the surrender to bullying claims of majority opinion and the so-called people’s will. That moral collapse felt as close to the emotions of 2025 as to 1724. As the chorus tore with terrifying venom into their cheerleading for Barrabas and self-righteous blasphemy accusations against Jesus (“Wir haben ein Gesetz”), the modern politics of pile-ons and scapegoating felt chillingly near. 

Brown’s bass, rounded, characterful but sharpened with an edge of tension, lent Pilate’s crumpling resistance to mob rule a tragic complexity. Here, the Judaeans who clamour for crucifixion remained “Jews” rather than the generalised “people” of some performances today. There’s no way to mask the stain of inherited prejudice in the libretti of this and other Baroque passions. But in this case you heard – in the chorus’s desperate vows of loyalty – how obeisance to Caesar had promised the Judaeans a shelter against Roman rapacity. Any radical preacher who menaced that hard-won settlement would incur the panicked rage that Bach scores into every bar. 

The storytelling zips and twists and leaps; it needs an Evangelist who can match pace with range and variety. Mulroy, long schooled in the part but never sounding stale, invited his hearers into the action with a versatile tenor tone, firm not hammy gestures, and an engagingly smooth but not monotonous delivery. When events demand mimetic, melismatic verbal scene-painting – when, after his triple betrayal, Peter “weinete bitterlich”, or when Pilate has Jesus so excruciatingly scourged, “geisselte” – Mulroy could pack a world of pain into a single snaking line. Next to him, Christus can look, and sound, like a bit-player in his own judicial murder. Yandell’s warm, serene bass-baritone had an unforced authority along with that sense of detached reserve. It made us grasp that, in the St John, the human action largely lies elsewhere. This Christus has the imperturbable majesty, and mystery, of a Byzantine icon. Against Yandell's benchmark of smooth stillness – with the hope of resurrection encoded in the anguish of crucifixion – the chorus supplied dramatic light-and-shade to spare. High and low voices beautifully balanced, phrasing and diction bracingly clear, they conveyed not only the pleasures of hatred as a persecuting horde but the mob’s propensity to split at any point into ferocious factions (as in “Lasset uns den nicht zerteilen”). But that’s only half the choral job. They must also turn, on a coin, into the reverent congregation who intermittently sing the stately Lutheran chorales. The AAM singers didn’t simply treat these pieces as episodes of repose. They imbued the reflective commentaries with their own emotional bite and drive, from the anxious, throbbing angularities of “Herr, unser Herrscher” at the outset to the tender ardour of “In meines Herzens Grunde”, and the final, gentle mourning of “Ruht wohl”. Even at the close, though, Cummings made sure that the choral interjections had a pace and pulse that wove them fully into the drama. 

The solos strikingly emerged from the surrounding musical textures, rather than sounding like dropped-in occasions for display. Soprano Carolyn Sampson (pictured above by Marco Borggreve), graceful but robust and expressive, danced through “Ich folge” in the joyous company of the flutes (Maria Filippova, Mafalda Ramos). She later brought lustre and liquidity to the darker palette of “Zerfliesse, mein Herze”. If Ed Lyon’s tenor launched into the tormented regrets of Peter in “Ach, mein Sinn” with a startling, far-from-defeated vigour, in “Erwäge” he started with a smaller, lighter voice that then spread into the richer vocal colours of the “rainbow” that heralds divine mercy to humanity. In “Von der Stricken meiner Sünden”, alto Helen Charlston (pictured below) channelled a fragile and vulnerable grief that found equal partners in the plangent oboes of Robert DeBree and Lars Henriksson. This is a finely nuanced voice, but would it bear the onerous weight of the second part? In “Es is vollbracht”, so often the work’s emotional culmination, I wondered whether she had unduly lightened an aria so associated with deep, ripe contralto mourning. But there was a fluidity and intimacy here that made it just as moving as grander interpretations can be, gorgeously enhanced by Reiko Ichise’s viola da gamba accompaniment. Indeed, the instrumental obbligatos lived up AAM’s lofty standards, with a lovely excursion for Sarah McMahon’s cello alongside Brown’s forceful pleading in “Mein teurer Heiland”. 

Whether as Pilate, or in his arias and ariosos, Brown often felt close to the core of this performance: his “Betrachte, mein Seel” had grippingly offset the afflicted urgency of the vocal part against the pair of restless, probing violas d’amore (Bojan Cicic, Persephone Gibbs). Overall, Pilate’s inner conflict – and his capitulation to “majority” hatred – stood at the heart of a St John Passion that dialled up the close-focus, moment-by-moment drama while it let quasi-liturgical solemnity take care of itself. If this is an AAM Easter “ritual”, it’s one that commandingly stages not just our past pieties, but our present fears. 

• More classical music reviews on theartsdesk