J.S. Bach: Johannes-Passion, BWV 245

“Singing the St John Passion for the first time changed my life,” Raphaël Pichon tells Apple Music. The French conductor’s revelatory recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sacred oratorio, made with the singers and period-instrument players of Pygmalion, projects the work’s visceral impact and profoundly human response to the death of Christ. The gut-wrenching power of Pichon’s interpretation stems from his childhood discovery of the work as a 10-year-old newcomer to the Maîtrise des petits chanteurs de Versailles, a boys’ choir based at the Church of Notre-Dame at Versailles, near Paris. “I’m not from a musical family but I started singing after a collection of coincidences,” he recalls. “I entered this choir and the piece they were rehearsing was the St John Passion. I didn’t understand anything about it. But the shock of Bach’s polyphony, of the church acoustics and then of this story and the feeling of being transformed by it was extraordinary.” Two hours of music felt like an eternity for a child. “There was this vast distance between the opening chorus, ‘Herr, unser Herrscher’ [‘Lord, our Governor’] and the last chorale, ‘Ach Herr, lass dein lieb Engelein’ [‘O Lord, let thy dear little angel’]. That was the original shock for me.” Bach created the St John Passion for his first Easter as Thomaskantor, effectively director of music in Leipzig. It was first performed on Good Friday 1724, revived the following year and done again at least twice more before Bach’s death in 1750. Raphaël Pichon chose to record the work’s final version. His view of the piece embraces both the heartrending drama of Christ’s betrayal, trial and crucifixion, and the contrasting message of hope symbolised by the resurrection. The opposites of darkness and light, he says, are central to his understanding of the composition. “Sometimes I think we forget how privileged we are to live in a free country, at a moment where death is so much more far away than it once was,” he says. Bach was born within living memory of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48), which wiped out half the population in parts of Germany. “What people were looking for from the church then was not how to arrange their lives; it was how to make sure that this life could be open to something better after death.” The St John Passion, he notes, tells a transformative story, one that offers positive meaning to a world convulsed by war, famine and avoidable disaster. “Bach is one of the most dramatic composers who never wrote an opera. Yet in such a simple yet deep and timeless way, he gave us the most important story.” Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion performed the St John Passion for the first time in 2014, and returned to it often before recording it over a decade later. “For me,” he says, “it’s been a personal companionship with the piece of more than 30 years.” And for Pygmalion? “It’s been a 10-year rehearsal! Most of the soloists were there from the start. Julian [Prégardien], Christian [Immler], Lucile [Richardot]… so many of them are part of this long journey. And with the choir and orchestra, too, we tried to make sure we understood this work as a collective: each word, each phrase, with each chorale as part of the drama but also a moment where we leave the drama. All these elements need to be addressed in a clear way because you have to embrace all of them at the same time.” Pichon pays tribute to a wealth of Bach interpreters, past and present, each of whom informed his understanding of the work. “We have the legacy of Karl Richter, then Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the majesty of Philippe Herreweghe, the knowledge and intelligence of René Jacobs, and then, of course, this big shock from the drama in John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach recordings. But we came to this music with perhaps a touch of freshness and innocence. As French musicians, we’re not from a long Bach tradition. So there was the possibility for us to say, let’s embrace this music without any fear.” The St John Passion, says Pichon, is “flesh-and-blood music”. Far from being remote from our time, it remains fully alive, wholly relevant. The point is underlined by the conductor’s choice of Evangelist, the work’s all-important narrator. Julian Prégardien, himself the son of a great interpreter of the role, enlivens the Passion text with his total immersion in the words of St John’s Gospel and searing expression of the all-too-human emotions they convey. “I’m doing Passions only with Julian. He’s the most important companion on this road of performing and recording Bach’s Passions.” With the release of the St John Passion, one branch of that road has reached its end. How does Raphaël Pichon feel now that he and Pygmalion have recorded Bach’s greatest choral works? “I have mixed feelings,” he replies. “I’m so grateful that we have these pieces, especially this one. At the same time, when we finished editing the recording, I had a moment of, ‘OK, now we’ve recorded the John Passion, the Mass in B minor, the St Matthew Passion and Bach’s motets. Yes, we still have so much to do with his cantatas. But wow, this big job is done.’ It’s particularly moving for me to release this recording. I think it’s one of the most important things of my life.”