Kent Sweitzer
Madison Bach Musicians performing the St. John Passion.
Madison Bach Musicians celebrates its 21st anniversary with one of Bach’s most famous works.
The Madison Bach Musicians, one of the city’s leading early music ensembles, celebrates its 21st season by performing Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, one of his most famous works.
“There are so many moving parts and it's so complex that, technically, the Passion should fall apart, but it doesn’t,” says Trevor Stephenson, Madison Bach Musicians’ artistic director.
The performances, March 22-23 at the UW-Madison’s Hamel Music Center in the Mead Witter Foundation Concert Hall, will be sung in German with projected English supertitles, and Stephenson will give a lecture about the Passion 45 minutes before each performance.
In 1727, while director of music of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Germany, one of Bach’s duties was to compose music for Good Friday vespers that recounted the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus. The result was the St. Matthew Passion.
Bach had written the St. John Passion three years earlier, but St. Matthew’s was on a much larger scale, as Matthew includes more detail in his gospel.
Two choirs and two period-instrument orchestras (of about a dozen members each, all drawn from the Madison Bach Musicians), various soloists, and a narrator who will act as St. Matthew, will fill the stage. Jesus (Matthew Treviño) and Matthew (Kyle Stegall) will take center stage. Other soloists include sopranos Sarah Brailey and Estelí Gomez, mezzo sopranos Clara Osowski and Chelsea Lyons, tenors Fran Laucerica and Dann Coakwell, and bass-baritones Alan Dunbar and Ryne Cherry. Members of the Madison Youth Choirs will add an angelic ambiance to the sound.
Associate professor of music at Lawrence University Mark Dupere.
Mark Dupere, associate professor of music at Lawrence University, will conduct.
Stephenson will play a Baroque chamber organ built in the Netherlands. The harpsichord and other period instruments, like Baroque oboes, flutes, and bassoons, as well as string instruments played with period bows, will deliver the sonic world of the 18th century to the 21st. Mark Dupere, associate professor of music at Lawrence University, conducts.
“There’s no other piece that I know of where you have two orchestras and two choirs in antiphonal response and playing off of each other,” says Stephenson. “There’s an element of drama that’s opened up by doing it this way. It was Bach’s equivalent of cinemascope.”
While Matthew’s gospel includes dark events in Jesus’s life— Judas’s betrayal, abandonment by his disciples, the trial before Pontius Pilate, and the Crucifixion — Stephenson says that Bach’s music is often light and airy, the opposite of what music that accompanies this litany of darkness might sound like. But Bach is a genius at emotional pacing and doesn’t linger on the dark side.
Despite all the work that Bach put into it, the Passion slid into obscurity after its premiere in the 1720s. But 100 years later in Berlin, the music prodigy Felix Mendelssohn received a gift from his maternal grandmother — a copyist’s handwritten score of the St. Matthew Passion.
Mendelssohn was astonished at the scope of the work and decided that the Passion should be performed for the public. After five years of preparation, he conducted it at the Singakademie in Berlin in 1829. Felix was 20 years old and the performance solidified Bach’s reputation as the greatest composer of the Baroque era.
Ticket info is at madisonbachmusicians.org.
