Dunedin Consort Ensemble/Photo: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan

Most of us are not used to hearing one of the great Bach Passions outside of Holy Week or Lent. But the Scottish Baroque ensemble the Dunedin Consort will be performing the “St. John Passion” on the UChicago Presents Early Music Series this Friday at Mandel Hall.

“This year has been an exception, certainly in parts of Europe,” explains Dunedin music director John Butt. “‘St. John Passions have been performed well out of season much more than usual because 2024 is the 300th anniversary of its first performance. It’s a piece we perform not every year, but many years. And in fact, it’s been done this year already by Dunedin so we have a sort of modus operandi for it. It’s quite easy to sort of resurrect it or microwave it, as it were. And in fact, we’ve got the ‘St. Matthew Passion’ anniversary coming up in 2027 and Dunedin Consort is going to start performing it about two months before Easter, you know, so that we can do a long tour that year around various venues.”

Hopefully another trip to Chicago?

“I certainly hope so: a sequel!”

It is unusual to have two great masterpiece anniversaries so close together. And it reminds those of us who were around for the 1985 tercentenary of Bach’s birth how much time that is because we’ve lived it.

“Yes, that’s right,” agrees Butt. “We’ve had two big Bach anniversaries because the year 2000 was 250 years after his death in 1750. 2035 is the next big one, which will be 350 years from Bach’s 1685 birth.

“Bach is the person that, as a performer and certainly as a musicologist, I have worked on the most historically, although I don’t work exclusively on Bach. My Ph.D. and so on was in the Bach field and quite a lot of my recordings and performances are of Bach, not all of them, but quite a few. So yes, it’s a sort of ground point, I suppose you could say of my career, but it’s by no means exclusive.

“I was exposed to Bach at a very young age. He always had a particular pull on me, probably more than anyone else when I was younger. I think later I’ve obviously developed to appreciate many other things as well, particularly composers who have a similar, but very different style, like Handel. Or composers who’ve digested Bach in a very particular way, such as Mozart. You can hear the Bach within the bloodstream, if you will, of Mozart.

“My parents did take me to concerts, and I remember hearing the ‘St. Matthew Passion’ when I was about ten. I didn’t enjoy all of it, but I enjoyed a lot of it. I also was very keen on learning the organ as a young boy. Obviously, the best organ music, with the possible exception of Messiaen, is definitely by Bach, even though there are some wonderful contemporaries as well. But it was Bach I was most keen on playing and what led my real mania for the organ.

“With the organ, your whole body is involved in playing music. So you not only get the contrapuntal notion of lots of different lines, but you also get this whole sense of your whole physicality somehow being involved.”

John Butt conducting/Photo: Tommy Gak-Ken Wah

For the “St. John Passion,” Butt usually directs from the harpsichord.

“For a Bach Passion, you definitely have an organ and in fact, possibly two for the ‘St. Matthew Passion.’ But it’s quite clear that harpsichords were also involved, particularly in the later performances of the ‘St. Matthew Passion.’ And it’s also clear that Bach used the harpsichord in some sense because when the John Passion was first performed back in 1724, he complained that the harpsichord in the Nikolai Kirche wasn’t properly regulated. So my guess—and it’s only a guess—is that Bach directed from the harpsichord and therefore played certain bits to help with the ensemble and to fill out the chords of it. The crucial thing to have is the organ but I don’t think there’s anything wrong in adding a harpsichord to fill out certain textures, but also as a way of actually helping keep the performance together.

“I’ve directed it from the harpsichord even in huge performances. I mean, if you go onto YouTube, you’ll see a performance that I did in 2017 in [London’s] Royal Albert Hall, and there I had the harpsichord. And of course, in a space as vast as the Albert Hall, the harpsichord is seemingly irrelevant, but it is actually quite useful in terms of the closeup performances, particularly with the smaller ensembles. The harpsichord is a very good way of keeping the ensemble together in a way that actual conducting can do, but with the harpsichord, you can sort of slip in extra notes to make the beat more obvious, or take them away. So it can really influence the way that the group gels, particularly in the smaller pieces.

“In terms of forces, we’re using more or less the same size of forces that Bach seems to have used if you believe that the number of parts he had corresponds to the number of performers. So that boils down to eight singers and strings 2-2-1-1-1 [two first violins, two second violins, one viola, one cello, one double bass] and then the winds to go with that. So it’s quite a small group, but the absolutely crucial thing is to keep the singers at the front and not at the back, because it gives them so much more clarity and diction. The power of diction is so much more impressive when they’re in front of the performers rather than behind them. We might even have the strings standing at times.”

So the vocal soloists are also going to be the chorus?

“Oh yes. I don’t think there’s any dispute now about the fact that soloists were leading the chorus. I think the remaining part of the dispute now is how many people were with the soloists. And, you know, the surviving parts, even up to Mozart, indicate this. I was looking at the Mozart ‘Messiah’ recently, for instance, for which we have all the original parts. It’s exactly the same. The lead soprano is also the lead soprano of the chorus. So yes, it’s very much a soloist plus chorus rather than soloists getting out of the chorus, as it were.

“Certainly in this case, we do have ripieno parts for one person so that makes eight in the chorus reasonable. And also it means we can cover some of the bit parts with the people who are there, you know, Pilate and various people like that. So we have really two excellent basses because of that, because the Pilate part is quite big. So we have two of our main soloists who are singing the chorus part.”

Joshua Rifkin recorded and toured Bach’s Mass in B minor with a similar approach but some of us found the sound a bit anemic.

“Well, of course, the aesthetic that Joshua tended to espouse was ‘less is more,’ in a certain sense. So he didn’t actually go for a particularly demonstrative style of singing. To my mind, it’s a pity because I think a lot of these singers in Bach’s time were brought up in the wake of the Italian opera tradition. So they had a really strong sense of personality and characterization within what they were singing. What I try and go for is the soloists to sing like soloists when they are doing their arias and recitatives, but that they also sing like soloists when they are singing the choruses. That way, the chorus has the same sort of contours, the same sort of address and clarity that you would expect from a soloist and that the extra people that you add to the chorus are there really just to sort of amplify that. They are what I would call mixers to the spirit, if you think of a gin and tonic. You have people who help fill in the gaps, but you’re still drinking a gin, you’re not drinking a tonic.

“Bach was very well aware of what opera does and did, and he’d seen them and he knew many, many friends who wrote and composed opera. So it’s not that he was ignorant of opera. He certainly attended them. We know he did in Dresden in 1730. That was just after the Passions, of course, but he worked for many courts and visited many courts in his time. And the bigger ones, at least—not the ones he was employed by—did tend to do opera. And he was in Lübeck for a while, and he could have seen the Hamburg Opera, the most famous company in Germany. And he was a great friend of Telemann, who wrote operas.

“[Lutheran pastor Erdmann] Neumeister, who instigated the new form of text for cantata libretti [some of which Bach set], used opera as a model and said that if these types of texts with the music going with them have an effect in the opera house and stir the emotions of the viewer, why can’t we capitalize on that from a religious point of view and stir the emotions of the believer? So in other words, the type of structures that Bach was writing were purposely repurposed from the concept of opera.

“And I think people go wrong when they think that these are operas waiting to be performed, as it were, as operas, because I think it’s the other way around. I think Bach had digested opera and processed opera and turned it into this liturgical experience. But instead of drawing the listener to the stage and to the characters on the stage, it actually reverses that and makes the stage the mind or soul, if you will. The stage is the soul of the person sitting in the pew so that the drama takes place in the listener’s mind. So from my point of view, they are operas, but completely rewired, as it were.”

Does the “St. John Passion” have a particular meaning after three hundred years? We’re talking about a piece where Bach had his eye or ear on eternity, if you will, in his own unique way. But on the other hand, the idea that this would be something we’d still be performing and have an iconic status three hundred years later, it would, in some ways, baffle him given how practical he was.

“Yes, exactly. Yes, I think it would totally baffle him. But I think there’s something about the piece, which is actually from the theology of John himself, which is this notion that the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning, and that everything twists. There’s a wonderful line from the Gospel of John where Jesus says, ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ The opening chorus and so many other things about the piece talk about all times, all ages. And one of my views of the piece is that it reminds you of something that actually hasn’t happened yet, or did happen, but might happen again, or that you’d forgotten about, but which you’re suddenly reminded about. There’s something uncanny about it.

“One time, I actually did the ‘St. John Passion’ in a church service. This was about twenty-four years ago in King’s College Cambridge in the Bach anniversary year 2000. We did the full liturgical version and had a sermon in the middle of it, just a ten-minute one. It was trying to draw out issues to do with the world as it was in 2000. It was trying to actually be an explication and meditation on where we were at that moment historically.”

That likely couldn’t be done in ten minutes today.

“No, no, you couldn’t. You’d need at least a couple of hours.”

Dunedin Consort Ensemble will perform Johann Sebastian Bach’s “St John Passion,” BWV 245, on Friday, November 15 at Mandel Hall at the University of Chicago, 1131 East 57th. Performance starts at 7:30pm. Tickets start from $22, available at chicagopresents.uchicago.edu.