Passion indeed

‘The dripping blood our only drink/ The bloody flesh our only food…/ Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.’ In spite of that. Anglo-Catholic convert T.S. Eliot knew a thing or two about Easter. The Passion story might end with resurrection and redemption, but it’s a celebration that we achieve in spite of agony, torture and abandonment, a tale whose root lies in the Latin ‘passio’, meaning suffering.

Musical Passion settings are no different — or shouldn’t be. A performance of Bach’s St John or St Matthew Passion should disquiet, even distress, as much as it consoles. But concert performances have become a comfortable festive tradition to slot in somewhere between buying the children’s chocolate eggs and cooking the roast — a Messiah with extra thorns — while now-ubiquitous stagings are simply opera-lite. A Passion that can find its humanity and not just its ritual beauty, that can transform an audience into a congregation, is a rare thing, but one Mark Padmore and the Britten Sinfonia achieve in their skilful reimagining.

This is liturgy for a secular age. Simon Russell Beale opens proceedings with St John’s Gospel, reading excerpts from Psalm 22 (‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?) and Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’ in place of the central sermon. But he is no priest, and his readings offer no answers. Their texts tangle and tumble under the weight of doubt and human fallibility, and the anger of Russell Beale’s delivery makes clear that he too is a suppliant, not a confessor.

His presence on stage throughout the performance is powerful — an onlooker to the Passion story, who watches from a distance as we do, involved but forever separate. When the performance ends with Jacob Handl’s exquisitely simple motet ‘Ecce quomodo moritur’ (an addition suggested by the St John’s Passion original liturgical context) it is sung not just by the choir but the entire orchestra and Russell Beale, a collective statement that breaks the frame of the Passion with outstretched hands.