Bach’s music figures prominently in most programs of this season, especially ones focusing on the dramatic, religious events preceding Easter. But performances of a variety of religious texts and composers who set them abound in concert halls large and small across the continent.

Boston’s Handel & Haydn society chorus made sure the city saw at least one professional performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 2006. Conductor Grant Llewellyn’s historical, double orchestra, headed by veteran concertmaster Daniel Stepner, engaged the audience instrumentally as firmly and masterfully as Picander’s gripping text. St. Matthew, chronologically the second of Bach’s two, complete, existing Passions, is always a major experience for the energetic performer as well as even the most placidly focused audience member. The movements taken together make up a baroque textbook of fugues, voice leading, homophony, recitative, arioso, duets, etc.; it’s a sort of "everything you wanted to know about the high baroque". Llewellyn’s forces included two continuo organs (one for each orchestra) and a who’s who of some of the best baroque players in New England: Gambist/violist Laura Jeppesen, violinists Christina Day Martinson and Jane Starkman, and flutist Christopher Krueger make music like no others.

Llewellyn made his own choice of vocal soloists, eschewing local names. Dominique Labelle, an opera singer at home in baroque styles as much as she is in classical and contemporary styles, sang the soprano arias. And James Gilchrist, an English tenor who was making his debut with the Handel & Haydn Society, sang the taxing part of the Evangelist.

The Boston Early Music Festival Series introduced the city to another St. Matthew Passion, one by Johann Valentin Meder. The group performing, Die Kölner Akademie, kept the forces small, only five singers and almost an equal number of instruments. Meder’s St. Matthew is an intimate, chamber work. It’s thinner, and very different in conception to Bach’s Passion monuments. Meder, a late baroque musician with Latvian roots, drew the attention of Johann Mattheson, who admired him enough to include him in his biographical sketches. His St. Matthew Passion dates from 1700/01 and shows influences of Schütz’s three Passions, composed more than thirty years earlier. Meder wrote more fluidly and emotionally than some of his contemporaries; he certainly set the stage for later, greater works of the genre.

Die Kölner Akademie, directed by United States-born Michael Alexander Willens, performed in Cambridge’s historic Sanders Theater. It’s a space modeled on Palladian classical lines, with an earth tone color scheme echoing the ruins of Pompeii. Almost everything in this semi-circular theater is of wood, lending a soft, warm reverberation to Meder’s music. Seventy-six set pieces make up Meder’s Passion, with almost 25 individual choruses (ensembles). Meder knew about proper pacing, but the typical, high baroque pattern of recitative / aria / chorus was yet to develop. Meder liked succeeding most of the Evangelist’s narration with reactions by the turba (crowd).

A single performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion highlighted Chicago’s busy Lenten early music life. It was organized and conducted by Daniel Robinson, who had brought singers and instrumentalists from all over the nation to perform at St. John Cantius, a large, Polish-Catholic Church seating 850. The counter tenor, Nicholas Pepin had an unusual story Robinson related. "I met Pepin by chance," he said. "We had a mutual musical friend who had recommended that he audition for me when he passed through the Midwest. Pepin was really trained as a meteorologist, which coincidentally was also my training. He did visit Chicago and sang in the chorus at our Assumption service. He’s a marvelous musician with a beautifully developed voice. We wanted him to sing Bach’s Passion, but to make everything legal and get him a work visa was almost impossible. It took a 100 hours of legal work to clear the immigration laws."

The Texas Early Music Project was founded in 1987 by Daniel Johnson in Austin. The project has metamorphosed several times and now supports four to six concerts a season, most of which Johnson conducts. For a spring concert he chose French baroque music with a Lenten theme and entitled the program "Passion." Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Requiem and his Le reniement de St. Pierre were the two major pieces. The Le reniement (denial) is a fourteen-minute work written in Latin that begins at the Last Supper, when Peter testifies to his loyalty. Music and text focus on Christ’s arrest and Peter’s denials. The piece ends with the chorus quoting the famous line from all three Gospels: "And he went out and wept bitterly." Johnson had conducted the piece several times before—once with William Christie in London. "It’s a Passion in miniature," Johnson states. "It’s extremely efficient with its use of notes, rhythms and silence. Everything happens so quickly; it sucks you in and keeps you there."
Gary Freeman