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Glyndebourne's St Matthew Passion, set in the aftermath of a school tragedy, was a risk worth taking.
Millions of years ago, when I was an A-level music student, the typical Bach exam question required candidates to present evidence that the composer could have written an opera if he had wanted to - in other words, that the sequence of narrative-aria-chorale used in his St Matthew Passion or St John Passion was identical to the recitative-aria-chorus formula used in opera. The present dramatisation for Glyndebourne of the St Matthew Passion by the director Katie Mitchell combines the two forms, creating a passion within an opera.
A group of travelling players arrives at a school to perform the Passion story to an onstage audience of bereaved parents somewhere in eastern Europe. How or why their children are dead is unknown. Was it a school massacre? Was it a coach crash? Was it fate or a human hand that was responsible? We are not told. All we do know is that the parents are grieving, that they are angry, bewildered and in torment. It is this that allies them to Jesus Christ and his all-too-human sufferings. He did nothing wrong, and it is the injustice in the Passion story that becomes the focus of this production. The chorus, as the onstage audience of the bereaved, wins our compassion. We watch its members become emotionally involved in the story, as they would have done in Bach's day.
The two groups of performers, soloists and chorus, perform to each other across the stage. This is frustrating at first, as we are treated only to profiles, or even back views, of the performers as they interact with each other across the bleak, neon-lit, schoolroom set. It feels almost like an affront that the cast is singing to itself, rather than to those who have bought the tickets.
Gradually, however, we come to identify with the chorus playing the role of the onstage audience to the Passion. Straggling in after the interval, shuffling chairs, they arrive even later than we who have had Pimm's-fortified picnics by the ha-ha. They sing the chorales unaccompanied, just as Bach's congregation would have done. They applaud with apparent spontaneity the onstage viola da gamba soloist, Jonathan Mason, while only etiquette prevents us from doing likewise. Mason has ascended from the wonderful Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the pit; alone of all the performers, he plays out to us, the audience beyond the footlights.
Mark Padmore, the tenor who plays the Evangelist/Narrator, sings with unblemished tone and marathon stamina, wandering among his sorrowful audience like a TV show host. His bitter account of Peter's denial and subsequent disintegration is deeply moving.
Andrew Tortise and Christopher Purves, the tenor and bass soloists respectively, are two of the bereaved. Tortise is an effusive and emotional young father who is ready for sacrifice in "Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen". Purves is older, a second-generation dad, so angry about the blood money that could have been spent on the poor that he overturns the teacher's desk in his pleading, tar-dark outpouring of "Gebt mir meinen Jesum wieder".
The soprano soloist Ingela Bohlin sings the semi-chorus line in the opening number in a disappointingly thin voice, but she is impressive in "Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben", which she sings with explicit human vulnerability, curled up on the table in the foetal position. Sarah Connolly, the alto, is in richly emotive form as she depicts the climactic agony in "Ach, Golgotha", while chorus members clutch each other at the recollection of their own moments of tragedy. With the deep-voiced woe of a troubled Mary Magdalene, she invokes the Christ-like attributes of penitence and remorse in "Buß und Reu" as her alter ego performs on Jesus what is surely the ultimate act of selfless love: removing his socks and washing his plates of meat.
Mitchell's production avoids the obvious; there is no crucifixion scene, no blood. There is nothing romantic in Henry Waddington's crud-covered, perhaps vomit-stained, clothing at the last. No words are changed from the original; the drama is tailored to suit the text. Despite the ominous presence of images of dead children, projected on to the curtain for the opening number and subsequently in niches surrounded by votive candles, Mitchell avoids sentimentality, a tendency in opera that was anathema to sober Lutherans, brought up on dry reason. This is achieved by the Brechtian alienation of the offstage audience that seemed so off-putting at the start.
We, the real audience, look on dispassionately. The third-party distancing of the black-tie crowd enables the production to succeed in a profoundly moving way. This is, after all, a reflection of individuals in our contemporary, secular society. We see it in others obsessing about religion, demonstrating their passion in self-immolation and other 21st-century carry-on. We understand such childishness; we, too, were like that once. We can sympathise, and, in Mitchell's Glyndebourne debut, we do.
The "St Matthew Passion" runs at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2007 until 26 August. For more information, log on to http://www.glyndebourne.com
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