Lassus: St. Matthew Passion (2018)

Musical settings of the Passion stories from the gospels date back to the era of chant, so this ancestor of the Bach St. Matthew Passion took its place in what was already a long tradition. How did composers render the tale without the benefit of exposure to Italian dramatic music? Some of them set the whole thing polyphonically, as a series of little motets. Lassus, by contrast, used chant for the utterances of the Evangelist and Jesus, setting the crowd's outbursts in short choral sections much as Bach did later. The ... Read More

Musical settings of the Passion stories from the gospels date back to the era of chant, so this ancestor of the Bach St. Matthew Passion took its place in what was already a long tradition. How did composers render the tale without the benefit of exposure to Italian dramatic music? Some of them set the whole thing polyphonically, as a series of little motets. Lassus, by contrast, used chant for the utterances of the Evangelist and Jesus, setting the crowd's outbursts in short choral sections much as Bach did later. The trouble is that the chant was not set down, and what you're hearing here from the Danish group Musica Ficta and conductor Bo Holten is simply a guess as to what chants Lassus might have known and used. The long stretches of Latin chant are not the flexible instrument that Bach's solo settings were, yet the basic configuration of solo narration enlivened by the angry choruses nevertheless has a punch. Longer motets relevant to the subject matter are also used; these were also not part of... Read Less