It is a brave conductor who would hold a packed Hamer Hall audience and a galaxy of musicians and singers in suspension, in raw silence for what felt like long minutes, late in the performative arc of Bach’s St John Passion. No program crackle, no relaxing of shoulder, no shudder of a bow. Breath stifled.

Conductor Stephen Layton, until recently Fellow and Director of Music at Trinity College, Cambridge, is an acknowledged master of timing and performance, but on this occasion it was as if there were something inevitable about the extreme control he was able to exercise over his players and public. The propulsive, emotive force of Bach’s music, its way of embodying and proclaiming human tragedy and nobility, had reached such a pitch that it was almost more than could be borne. Silence was mandated.

Anyone familiar with Easter liturgies will know that it is conventional to pause when the words of the Gospel about Jesus’ death are uttered: ‘And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit’ (‘Und neiget das Haupt und verschied’). A secular concert audience cannot be expected to observe religious rituals. But on this Melbourne Saturday, only one day shy of the three-hundredth anniversary of the first performance, in Leipzig, on Good Friday, 7 April 1724, of Bach’s St John Passion (Passio Secundum Joannem), the audience’s collaboration felt ordained – a willing marshalling of human sympathy.

The St John Passion is the first of Bach’s two great oratorios (the St Matthew Passion followed in 1729). But Bach never left his first Passion alone; up until its final performance in 1749 (the year before his death), he rearranged, revised, shifted choruses and chorales around, removed then restored them, added and subtracted instruments, altered scoring, experimented stylistically, honed and polished. The history of the work’s evolution is a feast for scholars/musicologists (the literature is immense). But for an audience, what matters most, perhaps, is Bach’s dedication to perfecting what was clearly a work of genius from its very first performance.

In 1724 Leipzig, as Thomaskantor, or director of music, Bach enjoyed a rich musical tradition and considerable resources, vocal and instrumental, but on a scale determined by the dimensions of the churches in which he worked, and subject to the whims, personal and financial, of councils and patrons. It is a boon of our age that, with the click of a mouse, we can summon up performances of Bach’s oratorios in the same close-quartered, though resonant, European churches (the ‘oratories’ that gave these great choral works their name).

It was gratifying, then, that Layton could conjure and sustain an air of related intimacy, of precise connection with all his performers in the vast space of Hamer Hall. There was volume and grandeur, certainly, from a hundred-plus MSO chorus, with its central phalanx of tenors and basses. There was the depth of the MSO’s orchestra, and guest musicians to draw on, but never any sense of bulk. The Baroque vivacity of Bach’s music, with its play and plaiting of voice and instrument, was never lost in bombast or grandiosity. Every thread of sound was audible and distinct, every cadence (of the Chorales particularly) was carved, as with a scalpel. Layton’s control was astonishing. One must also applaud (as the choir and audience did) the preparatory hand of the MSO’s Chorus Director, Warren Trevelyan-Jones.

The thread that holds the St John Passion (sixty-eight moving ‘parts’ in this performance), in linear coherence is the narrative voice of the Evangelist. His ‘script’ is taken from chapters 18 and 19 of the Gospel according to John, the passages that deal with the arrest, trial, crucifixion and death of Jesus (with brief interpolations from other Gospels). That the dating and authorship of John’s Gospel is an even greater scholarly/theological/historical conundrum than Bach’s serial revisioning of the John Passion should neither surprise nor daunt us. As drama, the narrative is extraordinary, and Bach’s rendering of it comprehends all of its Lutheran theological depth and complexity – and its stark beauty.

For the MSO performance, the Evangelist was sung by tenor Ruari Bowen, with an Ariel-like delicacy. He was the silver-solder of the narrative, not the centre of attention (as some tenor-Evangelists are wont to be). Bowen has clearly mastered the role (no surprise that he has worked before with Stephen Layton and also with John Eliot Gardiner). He sang without a score, his dynamic control crystalline, always enhancing meaning. He tackled the vocal acrobatics with ease, never letting them slide into histrionics. He is a young singer, so, if in the tenor arias the Evangelist is also required to sing (was Bach cruel, or just an astute steward of resources?), he evinced some strain, particularly in the long sustains, that will pass. The flexibility with which he was able to revert instantly to the Evangelist role is testament to his capacity for vocal adaption, and development. I look forward to hearing him again – and again.

Bach, or this performance, was kinder to Christopher Richardson, the bass who sang the part of Christus (Jesus). Richardson was able hold to his role with a poignant dignity, his arms still by his side, the only intimation of power coming from his voice as it swelled in volume or emphasis. The segues between Evangelist and Jesus (‘Jesus antwortete’, ‘Jesus answered’ etc.) were deft, swift, and natural. The language of Martin Luther’s German translation of the Gospel, graphic, rich yet succinct, was a gift to Bach akin to our English linguistic debt to the 1611 Authorized King James Version Bible, and to William Shakespeare. The consonantal punch of Luther’s German is another gift – particularly to singers.

In the Passion, Bach knitted together many disparate elements: the recitative-d chapters of John, plus snatches from other Gospels; grand and sombre choruses, some of breathtaking fugal complexity; arias and ariosos with words by German Reformation poets and others; eleven Lutheran chorales, reassuringly familiar to Bach’s congregations, all written in common time with orchestration aligned with the voice, but utterly transformed in Bach’s settings – alternately sombre, plangent, lyrical, declamatory. They function as the grandest, most anchoring kind of musical punctuation – stable yet inventive, like the great chevron pillars of Durham Cathedral. As I listened, the word that kept insinuating itself was ‘ensemble’. Bach was a master coordinator, able to split atoms of musical energy (the seeming anarchy of fugue, for example,) and then bring everything back together. Little wonder Einstein loved Bach (and has tough words for reviewers: ‘Listen, play, love, revere – and keep your trap shut’.).

Layton demonstrated a Bach-like control of his ensemble – players, soloists and vast chorus – throughout, but notably in the intricate interplay of voice and woodwinds or strings. Ashlyn’s Timms’s golden sound was burnished by the accompaniment to her alto aria ‘Von den Stricken meiner Sünden’ (‘From the bonds of my sins’), and by the viola da gamba in the molto adagio ‘Es ist volbracht’ (‘It is accomplished’).

Sara Macliver and the MSO (photograph by Nico Keenan)

In the aria, ‘Ich folge dir gleichfalls mit freudigen Schritten’ (‘I too follow you with joyful steps’), soprano Sara Macliver sang with a joyful agility – shining with and through the orchestration. All the more ironic, then, that Bach sets her aria immediately before the recitative passages that focus on the repeated disavowal of Jesus by Peter, his follower. And later (more Bach-ian irony), the lilting melody of ‘Ich folge’ is echoed and traduced in the taunting choruses of scorn and repudiation, ‘Sei gegrüsset’ (‘Hail’) and ‘Schreibe nicht der Jüden König’ (‘Do not write the King of the Jews’). But Bach has abandoned irony by the time the Soprano has to sing the line, ‘Jesus ist tot’ (‘Jesus is dead’). Macliver’s versatility was evident in the ease with which she shifted into the acute pathos of that final aria, ‘Zerfliesse, mein Herze’ (‘O my heart melt in floods of tears’).

Bass David Greco carried, with brio and dramatic attack, the difficult arias with chorus in the second half of the Passion (mercifully, Layton didn’t break the mood with an interval). I’ve always thought that the opening line of ’Eilt, ihr angefochtnen Seelen’ (‘Hurry, you assaulted souls’) was a dark joke perpetrated upon soloist and singers who have to keep together the huff, puff, and ‘Wohin?’ of this pell-mell marathon. If there was a slight fraying of ensemble in this rendering, I was past caring. And soon after, it was Greco who had, bravely, to break the great pause with his bass aria and chorus, ‘Mein teurer Heiland’ (‘My dear Saviour’), which seems to be an expression of Bach’s own question: ‘Ist alle Welt Erlösung da?’ (‘My dear Saviour, is this the redemption of the whole world?’).

Put Lutheran theology (or any theology) aside for a moment, along with the scandal of Christian anti-Semitism, and just listen to this work. I was shocked on Saturday – just six days after celebration of Easter, and with Passover in prospect – by how current, how challenging is the Bach Passion’s mirror reflection of the strife that assails us today, all around the world. The intolerance and brutality, the hypocrisy, divisiveness, and litigiousness we indulge. Several of Bach’s choruses are carping lawyers’ picnics – musical equivalents of Hogarth’s or Rowlandson’s savage caricatures of English justice. ‘Was ist Wahrheit?’ (‘What is truth?’) Pilate asks. What would he make of Truth Social? What answer could ever come from or be accepted by the compromised representative of Imperial Rome? Now, on every continent there is persecution, despoilation of the natural world, denial of justice and suppression of freedom. When Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s musical Acknowledgment of Country, Long Time Living Here, was played at the beginning of the evening, I could appreciate its beauty, but not yet understand how all of a piece it was with the experience to come.  

‘Ruht wohl, and bringt auch mich zu Ruh’ (‘Rest well and bring me to peace also’). Thus the words of the final chorus of the St John Passion. For Bach, they were prayer. In the no-man’s-land where differences of creed and allegiance cease to matter, perhaps they are words we can all say?

Finally, if you are puzzled, or troubled by John’s Gospel, as I have been, you might browse the following books, distinguished as they are by an integrity of scholarship and dispassionate analysis: The Gospel of John, Francis J. Moloney SDB, Volume 4 of the Sacra Pagina Series, The Liturgical Press, Minnesota,1998; and Life Abounding, A Reading of John’s Gospel, Brendan Byrne, St Paul’s Publications, NSW, 2014.

Baroque Festival: St John Passion (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra) was performed at Hamer Hall on 6 April 2024.