Alexandra Coghlan

The best recordings of my favourite Passion

Many today prefer the St John for its brutal, breathless action – verbatim theatre, centuries ahead of its time – but it’s the St Matthew that has my heart

For unapologetic intensity and soul-stirring drama head straight to Leonard Bernstein, pictured here at the Carnegie Hall in the 1940s. Photo: William P. Gottlieb / Ira and Leonore S. Gershwin Fund Collection / Getty Images 
issue 11 April 2020

In the autumn of 1632, a man called Kaspar Schisler returned home to the small Bavarian town of Oberammergau. He didn’t walk through the gates in daylight, but waited until night, sneaking in past the tower guards. A few days later he was dead from the plague that was swelling and blistering its way across Europe — a plague which, until that point, strict quarantine had kept out.

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