All Aboard for the Magical Mystery Play! Prom 66 Bach St Matthew Passion

We all occasionally think of some of the instruments of the orchestra as characters, but in an adult it’s no more than a momentary fancy (or a memory of a Hoffnung cartoon, perhaps for the most musically minded and less naturally quixotic) or perhaps some flash of nostalgia from a children’s story. Tubby the Tuba, perhaps, but why never Violet the Viola or Oswald the oboe?

In Peter Sellar’s ‘ritually staged’ St Matthew Passion, soloists from the Berlin Phil became part of the musical theatricality of it, playing solo characters in opposition to, or in sympathy with, the singers to whom them might normally be only orchestral accompanists. So Jesus places his hand gently on the shoulder of the double-bass player; a violinist stares at the Evangelist. Woodwind players become a strange chorus trio of instrumentalists: an enormously tall oboeist standing startlingly head and shoulders above his two colleagues on either side.

These are visual vignettes, and easy to dismiss as frothy posing too outre for a concert, perhaps outrageous for the least secular when they are applied to a religious or devotional work. I suspect (since I saw eight or nine people leave from ‘my’ door as I zoomed my wheelchair down the ramp for my interval cigarette after the first part) some of the audience did.

Apart from possibly failing to recall that the Passion is written in what is pretty much vernacular German for a mass audience—though not quite as earthy as the English Mystery Cycles—many of whom would probably not have been able to read, or at least not effortlessly, they missed one of the most important revelatory performances of this Proms season.

It was played by a ‘Reduced Philharmoniker’; about a third its number, and all of them playing like virtuoso soloists, even if they were not all given starring soloist roles. Not only was it a ‘reduced’ orchestra, it was divided: into what were, effectively, two chamber orchestras; as was the choir.

It was, at first, somewhat odd to see a peripatetic Simon Rattle walking briskly from one to the other rather reminiscent of television rolling news presenters stalking back and forth along a huge screen; but one got used to it. In fact, since the quality of the soloists’ singing was so high, and the choir so operatically expressive, both vocally and in physical expression and mobility, it rapidly became somehow perfectly natural.

Bringing solo instruments out of the orchestra to interact with the soloists gave this performance a diamond clarity of tone and colour and emphasis of instrumental parts that is normally the province of small authentic instrument ensembles. Whether the sound engineers translated this as effectively for the radio relay I don’t yet know, not yet having listened to my recording, but in the Albert Hall it was revelatory.

And even that was somehow drafted in to add to the theatrical effect of what is, in any case, a potentially gripping drama for instruments and voices. Pilate and Jesus were each found a spot up in the gallery still with an echo for suitable hollow doomy sound effects, with no technical sonic trickery required.

Of the soloists, special mentions, I think, for Mark Padmore (Evangelist) especially, who sustained a long night with amazing applomb and strength, while at the same time turning into an accomplished mime artist, and Magdalena Kozena.

There’s much more to be written on this; especially in the effect treating the St Matthew Passion as part Noh play, part Miracle or Mystery Play, part Nixon in China, has on the purely musical experience. That, hopefully, somewhat later.

Rattle and Sellars, with the BBC’s lighting director as co-conspirator, succeeded in almost breaking the record for the longest holding-off of audience applause. Admittedly, that was partly due to a little uncertainty as the lights faded down to almost black and left both hall and stage as though they were lit by a handful of candles. The lights were brought up again, and the majority—I looked around and did see less enthusiastic dissenters—of the audience erupted after what had really been an enormously respectful, even awed, silence, with total enthusiasm and demanded several ‘curtain calls’.

What a shame the BBC didn’t film it so everybody could have joined in for this truly magical musical mystery tour.

If you want to read the kind of stuffy curmudgeonly review that would have put me off ever going to any classical music concert before I was seventy (and is surely partly to blame at least for few Prom concerts having even a substantial minority of 25's and unders around) it has to be Rupert Christiansen's in the Telegraph. In another season, I'd be saying 'Bah! Humbug!'