by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Talk About the Passion (While You Watch It at Home in HD)

      Holy Week came early this year – camelast fall, in fact, when Peter Sellars and Simon Rattle brought their semi-staged version of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to the Park Avenue Armory.

I got to go, and got to write about it for this site; so did Alex Ross, who joined David Remnick in the lobby at the act break.   (Alex wrote about it for the New Yorker.)

Now – ‘tis the season – I am seeing it again, on a video available through the Berlin Philharmonic’s website.  (Type in the code “WQXR” for a 48-hour pass.)  It’s a strange experience.  It’s strange to see the singers performing while they sing.  It’s stranger to see them in the close-ups the camera affords (a bared shoulder, a pair of hands clasped, Evangelist Mark Padmore’s throat corded with tension during an aria).  It’s stranger still to watch the Passion at my desk, toggling back and forth between a piece of writing and a Bach Passion every few minutes – from the sound of the Passion to the sight of it.

Or is it so strange?  This desk – this square yard of space in Brooklyn – is where I have listened to several thousand hours of the recorded music of Bach over the years; and the listening was undertaken in part with the end of finding words for the cultural change that such an experience reflects – for the range of encounters with the music of Bach that new technology has made possible.   That is the idea of Reinventing Bach.  

What’s different this time, here at my desk, is that the technology is video – and it’s with the ubiquity of video in mind, I suspect, that Sellars and Rattle devised this semi-performed interpretation.  

There are 30 hours left on my 48-hour pass; I’m going back to Sellars’ Passion now.  

  1. etr-gu posted this