Johann Sebastian Bach
Matthäus passion

In any field, in any place, first-rate artists are never those who have universal ideas about their art on their lips, who mostly expound theories, formulas, and norms and are able to cordially present us the understanding and philosophy of things through the use of their immense wisdom. Usually, it is from the strength and consistency with which they put their principles into practice that we recognize their greatness. An artist of worth has the virtue of revealing his mystery, making the incense of the light he works with appear before our soul.

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and organist from the Baroque era. His works were congruous, outstanding thanks to the mastery of technical and expressive means, intellect and artistic genius, immense and elusive depth and beauty towards music. Lofty and noble was the art translated by someone universally considered among the greatest composers of all time. His art hides passion, romanticism, research, confession, a man who carries love for any form of life, a man who knows the hidden sentiment in the deep recesses of existence, capable of approaching God through the grammar of notes, the only artery to achieve inner peace, the glimmer of light reflecting melancholy stripped of its bitterness.

The St. Matthew Passion (BWV244) is a composition of sacred music for solo voices, with a libretto by Picander (his real name Christian Friedrich Henrici), a German poet and librettist. A very important person for Bach, as he worked on many of his cantatas written during the Leipzig period. The work of the German composer is inspired and dedicated through the musical transposition of chapters 26 and 27 of the Gospel According to Matthew, alternated with chorales and arias. The work is presented like the previous ones in the form of oratorio, the staging of the evangelical text is "converted" in a very simple way through the supremacy of the use of recitative, involved in the drafting of the arias and ariosos. Main characters for understanding the work, especially adopted by the composer for the theatrical representation of the gospel translated into music. Ariosos are musical forms, more operatic than anything else, in which vocal lines are conducted by free "lyrical" verses but in a recitative style. This form already appears in the symmetry of baroque vocal music. Thus a fundamental point of Bach's genius.

The DVD in question is taken from the concert held in two events on the 22nd and 23rd of March 2005. Remarkable performance by the "Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir Boys Choir Of Sacraments-Church Breda" conducted excellently by Hans Hulscher. Painting and coloring that panorama shrouded in sadness, the interpolated fears that refer to a theology that places sacrifice on the cross in a very personal manner expressed by the supreme composer. Music becomes a sort of requiem that narrates and exalts the meaning of Jesus's suffering on the cross, in a landscape languishing in solitude and hope. The soloists Jorg Durmuller (Evangelist), Ekkehard Abele (Christ), Cornelia Samuelis (Soprano), Bogna Bartosz (Alto), Paul Agnew (Tenor), and Klaus Mertens (Bass) extract the sensations wrapped in despair, the choirs follow with bulimia, the chapters flow slowly, brushed by moments and whispers trembling before the adultery and the sorrows afflicting Christ, tormented by the indifference harbored within human depravity. The desire expressed by the alto to cleanse Jesus with tears, the offer expressed by the bass to bury Jesus’s body. Acrimony, resentment, and bitterness are the sentiments directed by the choirs towards Judas's betrayal, the deep heresy committed by one of the apostles is funereal, malignant, so much so as to invoke hell to swallow him with its jaws. The choirs alternate between narration and solo parts taken up by "Christ" (Abele), bringing back a sound that reflects melody and weighty symphony through the themes that reappear, setting up a large-scale lyrical part. The structure of the work is characterized by the use of a double choir and the extensive use of baroque chorales in four parts, on the secretive and the metamorphosis derived from Bach’s other sacred works.

All the choirs are united in vast polyphonic movements, a harmonic music, a pre-existing melody that finds strength in medieval sounds, composed of vast expanses of Gregorian choirs, and vocal techniques such as the use of organum. Introducing a variety of rhythms in each individual voice. The movements follow one another in opening tones where the sopranos generate a moment of fallacious sound and great harmony and balance.

"St. Matthew Passion" is not only a work of art, not only a symbol of monumental philosophy, it is a dream finding a boundary between love and hate, a union between despair and suffering, good against evil, life and death, hope, the utopia frustrated by its shadow. The obsession, the sacrifice of a man who exposes the oblivion hidden in the darkness stained with abstruseness.
The light of day resting inert in an ocean of souls worn out by cruel martyrs, the night’s shadow concealed is merciless.