In the distinguished performance history of the Great Passion, this is a dynamic and powerful new reading. Its billing as ‘a controversial new recording,’ however, does Paul McCreesh no favours. What we are witnessing, primarily, is a compelling directorial vision, a dramatically cohesive whole which stands alone without the need for slogan. The subtext is, indeed, the use of single voices in the chorus, thereby applying the research presented in the last two decades by Joshua Rifkin and Andrew Parrott. However, as it happens, Paul McCreesh sees this option as a flexible way of enhancing the rich expressive possibilities of the St Matthew, a means to a somewhat greater end, thankfully, than joining the band of zealots who seek world domination in Bach vocal performance. The one-to-a-part option does provide a thought-provoking alternative, yet McCreesh’s reading confirms that size is not so very central to the generic interpretative aspirations which have defined the work’s 80-year-long recording history. It also conforms in its reference to many accepted traditions, mostly far from controversial.

There can be no denying that McCreesh uses the single voices to great and encouraging effect. The warm intimacy of expression in the chorales is often spell-binding, the lucid realism of the madrigalian commentaries touchingly palpable and the crowd scenes almost crazed, as if one were within the mob. McCreesh’s pragmatism also ensures that his quality singers produce a rich tonal body rather than a pushed, squawking consort. This is heard, for example, in the unsettling intensity of the fine Part 1 chorus, ‘O Mensch, bewein’. In such large movements he has supervised a luminous sound-world from Roskilde Cathedral in Denmark in which he can control a great textural and dynamic range, using the throaty new Marcussen organ as the solar plexus of the ensemble which supports the narrative with a constant and often theatrical presence.

There is some outstandingly characterised singing to be heard here, and a few missed opportunities too. Deborah York sounds somewhat al dente in her soprano arias, a limited emotional range partly accentuated by the colour and subtlety of expression of Magdalena Kozená’s ‘Buss und Reu’ as well as the enraptured and troubled ‘Ach, nun ist mein Jesus hin!’. Mark Padmore’s Evangelist is highly charged and responsive: at times he hovers, regaling the facts of the matter with disarming poise; at others he becomes agitated, even manic. He seems somehow implicated in Peter’s denial in a tableau performed with quite remarkable dramatic power, setting up Kozená’s ‘Erbarme dich’. Hers is one of the most painfully beautiful performances in years, even if the violin obbligato bulges too much for my taste and, more crucially, fails to match Kozená’s sustained line in the spirit of chamber music.

Of the two basses, the Christus of Peter Harvey conveys neither gilded halo or testosterone-fired ruddiness but he remains an effective and constant companion. Stephan Loges is an altogether more unusual presence, rhetorically imploring in timbre, unafraid to take risks and a singer one listens to attentively. His ‘Komm, süsses Kreuz’ is compelling and rich-hued, suffering just occasionally from lapses in intonation. ‘Mache dich’ is out of the top drawer.

Those switched either on or off by the ‘radical’ promotional hook of this account should know that McCreesh draws upon many recognisable musical traditions; there is always the danger that fast tempi and other commonly perceived ‘period’ conventions are assumed to follow suit, almost by default. The opening chorus, ‘Kommt, ihr Töchter’, although balletically sprung, conveys all-pervasive dramatic portents not dissimilar to the slightly quicker and even more urgent Siegfried Ochs in his recording from 1928 (yes, 1928!). And if one dare note a further ‘historical’ similarity, ‘So ist mein Jesus nun gefangen’ takes on a kind of metaphysical other-worldliness (as in ‘moon and stars have for pain been dimmed’) which Fritz Lehmann caught in 1949. For all the distinctive qualities here – not least a brilliant and shining dramatic immediacy – the palette reaches rather beyond a current view of historical correctness.

There is yet to be a clear leader in St Matthew Passion recordings, even if that were desirable. The quality of the production here is mainly first-rate although there are the usual dips and troughs one expects from such a challenging undertaking. ‘Können Tränen’ is a scrappy and flat affair with a strangely below-par Susan Bickley, and the strings are not always universally impressive. Overall, if not as culturally resonant as Harnoncourt’s remarkably mature and poetic reading, McCreesh’s interpretation has an unremitting singularity of purpose, as aesthetically Protestant as Harnoncourt’s is Catholic. A memorable and vitally conceived new account.