Prom 40, St John Passion, Bach Collegium Japan, Suzuki review - finesse and feeling

Bach’s St John Passion came into the world just three centuries ago, in Leipzig at Easter 1724. This year’s Proms shower of manna from musical heaven continued with a consummately polished, sensitive and – ultimately – very moving birthday performance by Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan.

Their profound familiarity with the work, and proficiency in all its idioms, bred not routine slickness but an inward intimacy that serenely bridged the gap between the liturgical rituals of the German Baroque and the music drama of today. 

For all his historically-informed scholarship (right down, or rather up, to Tomasz Wesołowski’s gigantic howitzer of a contrabassooon), Suzuki (pictured below) never stints on theatrical punch, drive and contrast in his rigorously managed transitions between chorales, choruses, solo numbers and recitatives. If, in the opening acts of the Gospel story of Jesus’s betrayal, trial and crucifixion, I felt that his masterly guiding hand was weighing a little too heavily on the performers, the climactic scenes saw emotions, and musical colours, blossom and deepen.Augmented by three of the soloists, who stepped forward for their arias and ariosos, the 17-strong choir fanned out in an arc behind the 20 players, along with Haru Kitamika’s chapel organ and harpsichord continuo from Masato Suzuki (the founder-director’s son). As, respectively, the Evangelist and Jesus (who doubled as bass soloist), Benjamin Bruns and Christian Immler (pictured below) stood close to Suzuki and responded to his surgically deft cues. In the huge prairie of the Royal Albert Hall, this tight squad created a cohesive, powerful if not always perfectly balanced sound (with the exquisite pairs of oboes and flutes even dominating the strings at some points). But the choir’s precise German diction and intonation, and the top-to-toe excellence of the soloists (soprano Carolyn Sampson, counter-tenor Alexander Chance, tenor Shimon Yoshida), made each movement vividly present. Suzuki sharpened the sense of a rapidly unfolding chamber drama rather than a set of static tableaux. From the bite and thrust of the opening, as the disquieting clash of oboes gives way to the anxious push of the chorus “Herr, Unser Herrscher”, to the drawn-out dreaminess of post-traumatic balm in the culminating “Ruht wohl”, his direction spiced contemplation with action. This reading never felt unduly rushed but it did skip smartly along. 

At moments in the short first part, I feared that polish might overcome passion. Bruns made a relatively light, crisp and busy Evangelist, lucid, lively and agile in his mimetic word-painting. Immler’s Jesus had an attractive aura of gentle but robust nobility but could sound slightly strained at his lower depths. In contrast, Sampson (pictured below) made “Ich folge” frisk and fly, dancing through the lines with an airborne grace, accompanied by gloriously skittish flutes (Yoko Tsuruta, Raquel Martorell Dorta). The Collegium’s woodwinds proved a consistent joy, with richly atmospheric interventions from first to last by the oboes of Masamitsu San’nomiya and Go Arai. As for the other soloists, perhaps both Alexander Chance, with “Von den Stricken meiner Sünden”, and the “Ach, mich Sinn” from Shimon Yoshida, initially sounded a little bullied by the flexing muscles of the band. But the clarity, purity and poise of both voices was beyond reproach. And the musical storytelling of Peter’s denial of Christ (with Yusuke Koike as the backsliding disciple) had all the pace and pathos you could demand. 

Still, the second part seemed to hit a deeper stratum of feeling and expression. As the chorus turns on Jesus, Suzuki made them snarl and spit with venomous relish as they stretched and twisted the words into warped shapes of accusation. Yusuke Watanabe made a properly doubting and divided Pilate, his hesitant voice of reason overcome by populist frenzy. Bruns injected urgency and variety into his long-haul narratives. In the bass arioso, “Betrachte, meine Seel”, Immler added touching, soaring sweetness to his grounded dignity: the result was ravishingly lovely. Capped by the limpid, liquid agony of Yoshida’s tenor in “Mein Jesu, ach!” (pictured below), with gorgeous solo excursions from Ryo Terakado’s violin, this section somehow found an even higher gear. Suzuki made the chorus into a truly volatile, capricious mob as they shrieked for blood (“Kreuzige!”), but then managed to turn them in a trice into the consolatory observers who soothe and uplift with chorales such as the, beautifully phrased, “Er nahm alles wohl in acht”. Tenderly shaped, full of fine shading, the pivotal “Es ist vollbracht” from Chance (pictured below) boasted a Handelian pulse of inner drama even if some musical dinosaurs (this one included) will always miss a mezzo or contralto depth of colour at this point. And he benefitted from an obbligato partner of equal finesse in the form of Emmanuel Balssa’s viola da gamba. Ringing and radiant, imbued with fervent warmth, Sampson’s “Zerfliesse, meine Herze” launched a final act in which musical hints of redemption and transcendence break into the sombre mourning and meditation. The long recitatives here can drag but Bruns lent them point and momentum. Suzuki spun from the choir a spellbound aura of relief and repose, with the oboe duo (as throughout) crucial components of the presiding mood.

Massive yet elegant, the farewell chorale with its invocation of little cherubs (“lieb Engelein”) brings us back to the intimate, vulnerable humanity at the heart of Bach’s salvific drama. If, at the outset, the sheer practised excellence of the Collegium threatened to mask that naked pain and dread, it flooded back song by song, chorale by chorale. By the finale they, and we, had struggled through anguish to grasp all the consolation Bach so lavishly supplies. 

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