In my St Matthew ‘Collection’ article (April), Bruno Kittel’s 1942 performance was covered somewhat equivocally on the basis of some Polydor excerpts on 78s which I’ve since discovered are taken from a different performance. The more complete version here is a real ear-opener and enriches the early recorded history of the Passion yet further, providing a shapshot of wartime music-making which places it alongside Gunther Ramin’s account with the Thomanerchor 18 months earlier.

What Kittel offers, quite distinct from Ramin, is a performance of sustained momentum and incremental characterisation, often at the whitest heat. There are fewer extremes than Ramin demands in his summoning of ‘authentic’ litheness and fervent religiosity. There are surprisingly brisk tempi – a large choir in this period does not equate to turgidity or heaviness, as one hears in all the large choruses – as well as long-arched lines of, mainly, legato phrases. ‘O Schmerz!’ is an extraordinary example of this, as well as being exceptionally sung by the bell-toned Evangelist, Walther Ludwig, whose deft timing, discriminating slides, and limpid expression are even more fluidly delivered than they were for Herbert von Karajan’s Vienna Bach festival performance eight years later.

If Kittel aspires more to the Siegfried Ochs tradition of Mendelssohnian performance practice (not surprising, given that he inherited Ochs’ position as Berlin’s leading choral director) than to the iconoclastic, concert-hall theatrics of Mengelberg and the subsequent generation, his choice of soloists offer the kind of consistent quality usually associated with the later era. Tilla Briem and Gusta Hammer may be forgotten today but they reveal their collective pedigrees in the most imploring and luminous ‘So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen’ I’ve ever heard (even if Fritz Lehmann has the ‘ayes’ on other-worldliness). Equally exquisite is the comforting expectation of Hammer’s ‘Erbarme dich’ (with Erich Röhn’s mesmerising solo violin) which sets sail like a great schooner in a faraway ocean. One senses that this is how it had gone for generations.

The recorded sound is bright and distortion-prone but the Bruno Kittel Choir are focused and febrile throughout. ‘Sind blitze, sind donner’ is appropriately terrifying and in the resigned sadness of ‘O Mensch bewein’ one detects resonances which couldn’t have escaped these Berliners in a citadel whose regime was about to fall. Nevertheless, this is a Passion performance which certainly transcends its time.