Le Concertographe - www.leconcertographe.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Image] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The man and the lamb London Coliseum 5 April 2000 Johann Sebastian Bach, St John Passion Mark Padmore (Evangelist), Paul Whelan (Jesus), David Kempster(Pilate), Natalie Christie (soprano), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (alto), Barry Banks (tenor), Michael George (bass), Leigh Melrose (Peter) Stephen Layton (conductor), Deborah Warner (director) English National Opera Chorus and Orchestra, members of amateur choirs The St John Passion is a work of J.S. Bach that we might never have been able to imagine if it had been lost without trace, but which could not be by anyone else. Bach's music-drama roots the joy of redemption profoundly in the pain of Christ's agony, within the Lutheran framework in both ideas and music, but in a life-like, sometimes confused, narrative and with deep personal feeling. This might well be Bach's opera. Deborah Warner's staged production at the ENO, sung in an already familiar-seeming new translation by Neil Jenkins, took the path away from trying to expose every resonance of meaning and crisis of emotion. Instead, the voices of the Evangelist and the aria singers became the main action, the evolving feelings of pitying but guilty observers of the austerely depicted sacrificial action of the plot. The sparse set -- two platforms downstage for the opening chorus, three wooden pillars for crosses -- was filled at the beginning with glowing light bulbs, a beautiful image in itself and perhaps a reminder of the scattered sparks of divinity in John's alleged Gnostic background. At the end, the stage was covered with supermarket bunches of flowers, like Kensington Gardens after Diana's death, an ostensibly kitsch image that was transcended at the very last moment by a sublimely evocative and moving visual coup. In between, however, the singers sang with operatic expansiveness in a vast space and the action of Christ's trial and death was acted out with a mininum of fuss. The first performance was visibly under-rehearsed. Only Mark Padmore's Evangelist, initially a gung-ho story-teller, gradually more and more distressed by the story he is narrating, held together completely, though Barry Banks' performance of the aria after Christ's scourging was extremely moving and coherent. Most of the other performances did not have enough musical precision and dramatic intensity or focus to carry the implied emotion. The exceptions were Paul Whelan's picture-book, but beautiful, Christ and Paul Kempster's corporate, dodgy Pilate, remniscent of the presidential President of Antioch in Peter Sellars' Theodora. It was, though, great to hear fully dramatic performances of the choruses. An additional chorus, assembled from amateur choral groups, sang the congregation's chorales, and the audience was invited to join in three key chorales, which they did quietly but generally without embarassment. It was a strange but moving reversal of the sort of audience singalong that must have happened in the Coliseum when it was a music hall. Warner's production has many fine points, and it certainly didn't undermine Stephen Layton's comparatively expansive direction of the music. But there was something hacked together about this performance. It's probably worth seeing again when the singers have had more chance to integrate their individual performances with the communal force of the chorus. H.E. Elsom ------------------------------------------------------------------------