Bach wins through

Bach’s St Matthew Passion doesn’t seem an obvious ‘Glyndebourne opera’, except from the point of view of the non-Londoner having to use public transport to get there, who might well regard the whole outing as a penitential pilgrimage. At the third performance the atmosphere did seem unusually hushed. What we were offered was an almost entirely silent play within which a performance of Bach’s masterpiece took place. The idea, a notably bad one of the producer Katie Mitchell’s, is that in a school somewhere in Europe there has been a shooting, with many children, whose photographs we are shown, killed. Four travelling players come and console the mourners, enlisting the onlookers for the small parts in the Passion, and getting them all to sing the choruses and chorales. This much we are told in the programme, as well as that the story of Christ’s death is experienced through the spectators’ (on stage) own grief. A long and painfully banal article by Karen Armstrong, also in the programme, naturally refers to 9/11, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay. In case we hadn’t noticed, there is still plenty of suffering around to be comprehended and understood.

I’m not sure what this is meant to achieve. Does the framing of the Passion in this way make Christ’s suffering more relevant to us? If we didn’t think it was already, clearly it doesn’t. If we did, then Bach’s work, not Mitchell’s, is what we want to experience; and in a powerful performance, which isn’t, all told, what happens at Glyndebourne, despite the musical aspect being considerably more successful than I had expected from the intensely hostile reviews. Part of its lack of force is the result of the chorus acting their parts all too convincingly: at least that is the charitable interpretation of the unbelievably ragged singing we get from them throughout.