Our performance of the St Matthew Passion was at ‘baroque pitch’ i.e. a semitone low. I found this hard to get used to, and have been trying to work out why, given that in 2012 and 2013 I performed Messiah at baroque pitch without being at all bothered. Apart from that almost everything I’ve sung recently has been at A=440.
Is it that I am more familiar with the Messiah, use the score less (and in performance not at all), so there is no ‘travel sickness’ from seeing notes that aren’t the ones I’m singing? Was it because that I learned the Passion a few years ago in a very physically engaged way, and so there is a physical memory of what the notes feel like? Is it because I’ve done more performances of the Handel at baroque pitch (although I struggle to think which of the 20-odd I’ve sung these would have been)? Or has my sense of pitch got keener in the last couple of years (there’s some evidence for this)?