LONDON, Prom 51, Royal Albert Hall29 August 2000Wednesday's packed house suggested that the Proms audience is not suffering from surfeit of Bach; and anyone jaded might feel renewed by this enlivening performance of the St John Passion. The period instruments of the St James's Baroque Players imbued the drama with an intimacy shorn of rhetorical exaggeration - apt, when in Bach's account the Passion is an affair of the heart, not a religious ritual. An Everyman rather than a zealot, Paul Agnew sang the Evangelist with the buttonholing intensity of a man who has seen terrible things and must tell us about them. While Sanford Sylvan's Christ had all the necessary dignity, it was Gerald Finley's Pilate who emerged as the more complex character. Meanwhile, the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge relished every part assigned to it, one moment howling for blood, the next grieving or, in "Ruht wohl" (Rest in peace), offering comfort to their dead saviour. Ivor Bolton allowed the music to breathe, nowhere more so than in the obbligatos. The viola da gamba (played by Erin Headley) that wove in and out of Michael Chance's counter-tenor aria "Es ist vollbracht!" was as beautiful as anything I heard this week. Nick Kimberley http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=48603
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