This new recording of Bach's St John Passion from South Germany follows the version of the score which Bach first performed in Leipzig in 1724 and which is published in the Neue Bach Ausgabe. Enoch zu Guttenberg is a Bavarian who founded his Neubeuern Community Chorus in 1967. Their recording of the St Matthew Passion, which I reviewed in September 1991, left me disappointed. Guttenberg had a feeling for the vivid drama of the piece but failed to pace it effectively; and he was not especially well served by the choir. The orchestra there and in this new issue is the Munich Bach Collegium which is never less than reliable.
On balance the St John Passion comes off more convincingly than the St Matthew. The music is paced with greater dramatic assurance, and the chorus is on livelier form enjoying a more sympathetic recorded balance than in the previous issue. The solo vocal line-up is variable, as indeed it was in the St Matthew. The Evangelist in both is the tenor, Claes Ahnsjo, whose clear diction and fine ear for detail enable him to project the music with all the authority of an accomplished narrator. The bass, Anton Scharinger, gives a disciplined performance as Jesus though I did not much care for the artificially hollow sounding acoustic in which he was placed. The tenor, Robert Swensen, is an expressive singer but the music stretches his technique to its limits as you will find, for instance in the aria ''Erwage, wie sein blutgefarbter Rucken'' (Part 1, No. 20). Inge Nielsen sings both of the soprano arias stylishly and with a good sense of pitch while Nathalie Stutzmann is entrusted with the three alto arias. I have not always enjoyed her singing in previous recordings but her voice is a fine one and she seems to have brought under tighter rein aspects of her technique which have sometimes struck me as at odds with the stylistic content of the music.
Where I am considerably less happy, however, is in the idiosyncratic treatment afforded some of the great choral movements. Nowhere is this, to my ears, more perverse than in the opening one where Guttenberg relentlessly hammers home the strong accents with all the prosaic determination of a schoolmaster intent on drumming some point of syntax into a class of recalcitrant children. ''Gross'' is the current buzz-word, I believe, but it is certainly an apposite one in this context. Few readers are likely to subscribe to this affected indeed simplistic view and though it is not without its dramatic moments these are achieved by superficial means which have little to do with the period and aesthetic to which the music belongs. It must be reported, furthermore, that towards the end of the movement there is a degree of distortion in the live recording.
To sum up: this is a patchy performance which is unlikely to draw readers away from several more consistently well sung and better sustained accounts listed in The Classical Catalogue. If a performance with a large choir—this one numbers about 90 singers—and an orchestra of modern instruments is required then there is, perhaps, little to choose between the newcomer and several much older versions. My first recommendations, however, though not necessarily in this order remain John Eliot Gardiner (Archiv), Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Teldec), Sigiswald Kuijken (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi), and Andrew Parrott (EMI) who, incidentally, bases his performance on the 1749 score using a significantly smaller vocal ensemble than any rival version.'