Gachinger Kantorei, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, Helmuth Rilling - Wolfgang Rihm: Deus Passus (2001) 2CDs

×

Gachinger Kantorei, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, Helmuth Rilling - Wolfgang Rihm: Deus Passus (2001) 2CDs

Close

Deus Passus is one quarter of the Passion Project 2000, which celebrated not only the turning of the millennium but also commemorated the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death. German conductor Helmuth Rilling honored this occasion by commissioning Passions from four disparate composers: Wolfgang Rihm, Tan Dun, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Osvaldo Golijov. Deus Passus is a setting of the Passion according to St. Luke, and it is a marvel of a piece for many reasons. For a full hour and a half, with music that is mostly slow and largely atonal (in the sense that Berg’s music is atonal), the twisting, aching, unpredictable harmonies are totally captivating. Rihm chooses a straightforward setting, a simple, dramatic telling of the story, and it is in his capacity for restraint that the true brilliance of the piece lies. He uses the chorus sparingly, mostly for dramatic purposes, having it portray the angry rabble bent on crucifying Jesus (as it often does in Bach’s passions). He employs percussion even less frequently, making it especially brutal when it is used, particularly as it depicts hammers driving the nails into Christ’s hands.

Rihm capitalizes on the history of the Passion, drawing on Bach as an influence, but where other composers who aim for the “modern ancient” kind of sound fail (people like John Tavener) Rihm succeeds because of his thoroughly musical (as opposed to blandly philosophical) mind. He has created a work that is truly timeless, being both progressive and ageless. Helmuth Rilling has a deep and serious understanding of this piece–his pacing is appropriately slow and menacing but never simply plods along, and he finds both the individual lines and the harmonies they outline.

The performances are all appropriately hushed, saving the sturm and drang for the proper moments. Soprano Juliane Banse has an exquisitely piercing quality, ideal for the agitated “Qui cogitaverunt malitas”, one of the work’s rare fast sections. Her voice balances nicely against Iris Vermillion’s mezzo and Cornelia Kallisch’s dark, smoky alto–and all of the singers are capable of blending with one another. This is used to dazzling effect in the final movement, a setting of Paul Celan’s holocaust poem “Tenebrae”. Rihm uses all of his forces for this twist-the-knife ending, a bringing of the passion to modern times by simply relating it to a more modern tragedy. The recording, a live performance (though you would never be able to tell save for the applause at the end) captures the emotional intimacy that this piece demands–everything is recorded closely and well, and the sound of the orchestra is both “ancient” and lush.

Review by ClassicsToday.com (Artistic: 10/ Sound: 10)

To mark the 250th anniversary of Bach's death last year, the International Bach Academy Stuttgart came up with the Passion 2000 project, through which it commissioned four composers from very different musical traditions to compose a Passion setting, each of them to be drawn from a different gospel. The Russian Sofia Gubaidulina produced a work based on St John, the Chinese-born Tan Dun a "Water Passion after St Matthew" and the Latin American Osvaldo Golijov a Passion according to St Mark.

To compose his quietly remarkable contribution, Wolfgang Rihm opted for St Luke, because, he said, it was the account of the passion story "least tinged with anti-Semitism", and that it would be impossible now for a German composer to use any of the other gospels.

Rihm subtitled his work "Fragments of a St Luke Passion", and as the title Deus Passus indicates, switched the focus from Christ to a suffering God, as well as reflecting upon Christianity's subsequent effect upon history. He retained only the bare narrative bones of the story as Luke recounts it; the rest of his text is compiled from a range of other sources - from the Roman Catholic liturgy for Holy Week, the Old Testament and a 13th-century Marian lament. The sequence ends with a setting of Paul Celan's Tenebrae, in which the poet rails against God's inability to prevent the suffering of the modern world.

This patchwork of materials is cast into 27 musical movements (some last less than a minute, the longest - the Celan setting - nearly nine) and alternating settings for one or more of the five soloists, with densely woven choral writing and the occasional instrumental interlude. The scoring is dark and restrained. The orchestra contains no brass apart from a trombone, though copious woodwind, percussion, harp and organ as well as strings, and the pacing is generally measured and contemplative. The sound world Rihm employs is identifiably his own, yet it also carries resonances of Bach passions too, in the twinning of a plaintive solo oboe with strings, for instance, and in the paring down of the textures to just a handful of instruments to underpin some of the vocal numbers.

In this performance under Helmut Rillingm, with a top-flight quintet of soloists and rapt choral and orchestral contributions, the result is powerful, eloquent, and often gravely beautiful. The cumulative effect becomes far greater than any that of its constituent parts, and just as Rihm's music manages to be both radical and expressive without any concessions to fashion, so the texts themselves are assembled in such a way that the familiar events they amplify take on another resonance. The final inclusion of the Celan poem, which confronts a Jewish post-Holocaust sensibility with the Christian ritual, gives the work another twist, opens it out, universalises it. Even in an output as vast, varied and accomplished as Rihm's, Deus Passus seems likely to occupy a special place.

Review by Andrew Clements, The Guardian

×

Gachinger Kantorei, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, Helmuth Rilling - Wolfgang Rihm: Deus Passus (2001) 2CDs

Close

×

Gachinger Kantorei, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, Helmuth Rilling - Wolfgang Rihm: Deus Passus (2001) 2CDs

Close

×

Gachinger Kantorei, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, Helmuth Rilling - Wolfgang Rihm: Deus Passus (2001) 2CDs

Close