SCO & SCO Chorus: Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Edinburgh review: 'utterly assured'

SCO & SCO Chorus: Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Usher Hall, Edinburgh ★★★★★

It’s hard to believe that Maxim Emelyanychev hasn’t conducted Bach’s St Matthew Passion before. Okay, it’s a piece that’s well enough known – a vast, multi-movement contemplation of Christ’s last days and crucifixion, and for many one of music’s profoundest utterances. But Emelyanychev’s traversal of Bach’s monumental creation with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – plus the SCO Chorus, choristers from St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral and a whole roster of fine soloists – felt calm and considered, expertly paced, and wonderfully balanced between conveying the work’s dramatic storyline and pondering its spiritual themes. In other words, utterly assured, and the work of someone with a profound connection with the work.

In fact, “monumental” is probably the wrong word here: in Emelyanychev’s hands it felt like a deeply intimate experience, and often a profoundly human one too – something echoed in Matthew Brook’s perceptive performance as Christ, which swung between cool contemplation and much hotter-blooded fear and fury as his execution draws nearer. Nick Pritchard made a nimble, bright-toned Evangelist, sharing Christ’s story eagerly as if with friends, and Roderick Williams felt like luxury casting in the relatively small role of Pilate, though he too explored the man’s nuances and contradictions. The SCO Chorus was on exceptionally strong form, rising to Bach’s cries of accusation and regret with moving conviction, and 14 young singers from St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral brought a resplendent brightness and sparkle to Part 1 of the work.

READ MORE: Maxim Emelyanychev on his plans for five more years with the SCO

Yes, it’s a huge work for enormous forces. But it was Emelyanychev’s turn away from monumentalism in favour of intimacy, drama and emotion that really brought the performance alive, encapsulated in some of the evening’s most exquisite moments: SCO leader Stephanie Gonley’s achingly tender violin line in the aria “Erbarme dich”, for example, or her colleague Marcus Barcham Stevens’s correspondingly fiery playing in “Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder”. Like so much of what Emelyanychev touches, it felt seen and conveyed with bracing freshness – not radically transformed, but deeply reconsidered all the same.

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