I was given a ticket to Bath Abbey’s Holy Week performance of Bach’s St John Passion, given by the Abbey girls and men with Ruairi Bowen as the Evangelist and Rejouissance playing.
The Abbey is still unheated (a part has broken in the underfloor heating installed recently) so I was rather glad it wasn’t the St. Matthew, and I think the temperature caused some tuning problems for the orchestra too. But I had a good seat adjoining the central aisle.
The performance had a home-grown, Passion Play, feel because apart from the Evangelist all solo parts were (ably) taken by choir members, who slipped out of the staging and came round to the front when needed. (The rhythmically tricky Wohin? chorus was just done by half of the trebles.) This created a sense of collective involvement between performers and audience, many of whom are regulars in the Abbey congregation. All I missed was some of the weight and downright viciousness an adult top line can give to the crowd scenes in this work.