St. Mark Passion worthy of Bach

Reconstruction of lost libretto showed no stylistic incongruities

According to one of his sons, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote five passions. Only two of them, those according to John and Matthew have survived, however. A St. Luke Passion, listed in some older catalogues of his works, is almost certainly spurious.

The libretto for his St. Mark Passion has come down to us, however. Although Bach's music for the libretto seems to be irretrievably lost, several people have proposed reconstructions based on Bach's own practice of borrowing from his cantatas and other works.

Although plausible musical settings for the arias and chorales were found years ago, the problem of finding music by Bach that would fit the appropriate gospel words seemed insurmountable.

Two musicologists, Simon Heighes and Andre Gomme, each produced a plausible reconstruction by using the recitatives of a composer named Reinhard Keiser, who himself wrote a St. Mark Passion. His musical language was close enough to Bach's that one is seldom aware of any stylistic incongruities.

The Outaouais Festival of Sacred Music presented two performances of Heighes's version over the weekend, on Saturday at St-Benoit-Abbé in Hull and yesterday evening at the Notre Dame Basilica in Ottawa.

Thus it was that, 269 years after the good burghers of Leipzig heard Bach's St. Mark Passion for the first time, something like it received its Canadian premiere in suburban Hull.

It would doubtless be better to hear Bach's original, were it available, but there's no denying that Heighes knew what he was doing. So did Keiser, and this reconstruction is an entirely worthy appendage to the Bach canon.

Louis Lavigueur conducted a generally worthy performance featuring the Cantata Singers, the Hull Chamber Orchestra and vocal soloists Teresa van der Hoeven, Renee Lapointe, Michiel Schrey and Paul Grindlay.

Each of the soloists was excellent. If Schrey and Grindlay stood out, it was largely because they had the two key parts, those of the Evangelist and Jesus.

The Cantata Singers were sounding wonderful, no doubt portending another fine season from them.

The orchestra played reasonably well, though there were occasional intonation problems, most conspicuously in the viola da gamba accompaniment of one of the arias.