A spiritual experience: St Matthew Passion with Mark Padmore and the OAE
St Matthew Passion
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Royal Festival Hall
Side Stalls Z50, £10, upgraded in the second half to Choir Stalls
26 March 2018
Southbank page
As a Bach singer I think Mark Padmore has his failings – but as a Bach stager he’s my current nonpareil. The setup he used in this performance meets my ideal: eight singers in each choir, ripieno and soloists in each, the Evangelist and Christus the tenor and bass soloists of the first choir. Solos are allocated depending on the orchestration of a given movement, which amplifies the drama and cogency of Bach’s writing for two distinct ensembles. Not only this, it also lends a sense of egalitarianism that makes the light scoring of historically informed performance more than just a way to achieve agility and intimacy. I’m sure all of this was conscious on Padmore’s part, the egalitarianism persisting even to the bows, which were taken only collectively.
The staging was thus true not only to the texture of Bach’s music but to its spirit, and when it’s a piece such as this that is a very exciting and uplifting thing to be in the presence of. I’d believe the effect would survive in performances where the notes were less than perfect but there was no need to put that to the test with the soloists of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, who were pretty much universally astounding. As per Padmore’s scheme it seems churlish, and would indeed be misleading, to single out any performer for special praise: they all played throughout with a musicality and sensitivity that again meets my ideal. The only thing I would complain about is the ensemble, which for the dual-orchestra movements didn’t quite meet the high standard of everything else; I hesitate to attribute this to a lack of rehearsal time or to an inevitable difficulty of this conductor-less approach but that’s what I lean to. If slightly sloppy ensemble is the price to pay I think it’s worth paying.
It always seems to be more difficult to get vocalists who match instrumentalists strength for strength and so it’s not too surprising that that was the case here. Perhaps inevitability this is where Padmore’s egalitarianism showed its strain, the soloists of the first choir clearly more expensive than those of the second. In some places this worked wonderfully in showing the limits of what money can buy: the young tenor Hugo Hymas from the second choir was tremendously alive and in tune and in time in a way that Padmore, I sense struggling to cap his more mature voice for the scale of the ensemble, simply wasn’t. But the young Eleanor Minney was, I’m afraid, really too quiet to sing the marathon that is Können Trännen, and I think ideally you’d want closer parity between her light voice and the almost excessively fruity richness brought by Claudia Huckle in the first choir. In the grand scheme of things, though, these really are niggles – as ensembles the two choirs as a whole sang with wonderful precision of pitch and clarity of diction.
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