Bach: St John Passion CD review – a powerful reading from René Jacobs

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The countertenor René Jacobs sang the alto solos in the revelatory Bach Passion performances of Leonhardt, Herreweghe and others. Now in a later generation of the period instrument revival he directs a powerful and individual reading of the 1724 St John Passion. He favours strongly profiled rhythms, chorales with end-of-line pauses, and full-throated singing from the RIAS Chamber Choir (16 singers, augmented for the chorales). The eloquent Werner Güra is a more operatic Evangelist than our choral scholar tradition might allow, and the soprano is too shrill; Benno Schachtner is a worthy successor to Jacobs’s alto. The recording layout favours wind over strings.There is a valuable appendix of the numbers that Bach added in 1725, but over a lifetime of revision then omitted.