When Auckland Choral last performed St Matthew Passion three years ago, the event was almost sabotaged by a small troupe of dancers, writhing and bumping their way through one of Bach's most profound works.
Last Saturday, projected religious images from the Auckland Art Gallery were far less distracting, making particularly
apposite connections whenever a familiar Colin McCahon painting slipped on to the screens.
Conductor Peter Watts has the measure of this work musically and, once past a curiously lacklustre opening chorus, Auckland Choral delivered a generally solid sound.
Most effective, even if it might have caused shudders among the authenticist brigade, was the choir blurring the distinction between speech and song in the chorus, "Have lightnings and thunders".
Chorales were the strongholds sure that Bach intended, with their poetry on the screens above.
Kenneth Cornish's Evangelist was a restrained commentator, the cleanly delivered lines of his recitative being a decided pleasure. How one's heart goes out to anyone being asked to face an audience with lines like, "Now Peter sat without in the palace and a damsel came unto him!"
While moments of passion above the stave were not so comfortable, Cornish relished the extravagant earthquake recitative in Part 2. James Tibbles provided appropriately storm-tossed organ accompaniment.
David Griffiths' Christ, although still muffled at crucial moments in his lower register, brought a telling operatic fervour to his "My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me?"
Mezzo Anne Lamont-Low was also challenged below the stave, and throughout Lisette Wesseling's austere soprano made little emotional contact, especially in her great aria with oboes and flute. Yet the women's duet, Behold my Saviour Now is Taken, was memorable.
Grant Dickson, with enviable vocal projection, characterised Judas with a fruity vibrato that was not so appropriate elsewhere in the evening, while John Murray deserves the heartiest congratulations for singing "Endure, endure", a tenor's graveyard if ever there was, with sangfroid and musicality.
The small orchestra of Pipers Sinfonia was occasionally tested by Bach's score, although the stylish woodwind-playing added much to the success of the evening.
