St Matthew PassionMaimon Schwarzschild

The American Bach Soloists will be performing Bach’s St Matthew Passion in various locales around the San Francisco Bay Area during this week and next weekend.  Go and hear it if you are anywhere near the Bay Area: and it might be worth a special trip if you’re not.  This is a superb performance: crisp, elegantly disciplined, quite ravishingly beautiful.

The St Matthew is Bach’s “biggest” single work: certainly in scale, and many people think in greatness too.

For a Jewish listener, it is a disturbing work as well, of course.  The Passion is faithful to the Lutheran New Testament in treating the Jewish “High Priest, Elders, and Scribes” — and of course Judas — as the embodiments of evil.  It’s scarcely possible to listen to this today in the German language without shivering.

The work also has a happier Jewish connection.  The St Matthew Passion was unperformed and all but forgotten for three quarters of a century after Bach’s death in 1750.  It was revived in 1829 — by Felix Mendelssohn, whose public performance of the St Matthew restored Bach’s music generally to European and world consciousness.  Felix Mendelssohn was the baptised grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, the great Jewish thinker and writer of the Enlightenment era.

Whatever ambivalence, Jewish or otherwise, you might feel about this deeply Lutheran work, it is immensely powerful and beautiful.  The American Bach Soloists perform it as well as you will ever hear it.   Don’t miss them.