A little over a year ago AVIE Records released a new album anticipating the celebration of Easter. The performance was by the Orchestra and Chorus of Cantata Collective joined by four vocal soloists. Tomorrow AVIE will release a new album, which may be taken as a “prequel” to the two compositions on the Easter album. As might be guessed, the composer for all of these works is Johann Sebastian Bach.
Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)
The new release is a more ambitious undertaking. While the two Easter selections fit on a single CD, the “physical” version will occupy three CDs. These will account for the entirety of Bach’s BWV 244 St Matthew Passion. This is in two parts, the first on the first CD and the second distributed across the other two.
Once again the conductor will be Nicholas McGegan, but there will be a more generous number of vocal soloists. Four of them are assigned “roles” in the narrative: bass-baritone Paul Max Tipton is Jesus, baritone Harrison Hintzsche is Pontius Pilate, and the narration of the Gospel texts is sung by tenor Thomas Cooley as the Evangelist, soprano Sherezade Panthaki is Pilate’s wife. Panthaki and Hintzsche also sing the soprano and bass arias, respectively. The other vocalists are countertenor Reginald Mobley and tenor James Reese.
Because BWV 244 is so much more massive than the contents of the AVIE Easter album, my opportunities to write about the music have been few and far between. My last opportunity came a little more than exactly two years ago. That was when I wrote about the second “volume” in the Warner Classics Remastered Edition of recordings of the conductor Otto Klemperer, given the subtitle Operas & Sacred Works. Klemperer, of course, predated the very idea of “historically informed performance;” and I have to confess that listening to his recording reminded me of spending a long period of time on an uncomfortable church bench! McGegan, on the other hand, has a better sense of “pace;” and, after listening to this new release several times, I have come to enjoy the overall experience, rather than dreading it as an ordeal!
