Richard Danielpour: The Passion of Yeshua

Richard Danielpour’s The Passion of Yeshua takes on one of Western music’s most heavily worked forms — the musical Passion setting, defined for most listeners by Bach’s St Matthew and St John settings — and reframes it deliberately: Yeshua, the Aramaic name, rather than the Latinised Jesus of Christian liturgical tradition, and a text and structure that situate the story within its own Jewish context rather than the centuries of Christian musical and theological tradition built up around it. Recorded with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus and the UCLA Chamber Singers under JoAnn Falletta, it won the 2021 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance.

About the work

Passion settings have historically been shaped almost entirely by Christian liturgical practice and the Gospel texts as read within that tradition — Bach’s two surviving settings remain the genre’s most performed and recorded examples. Danielpour’s approach is a conscious departure: framing the same historical story of Jesus’s final days from within its Jewish setting, using texts and structural choices that foreground that context rather than treating it as background. It’s a choice that asks a familiar musical form to carry a genuinely different perspective on material most classical listeners will already know primarily through centuries of a different tradition’s retelling.

About the composer

Richard Danielpour is an American composer whose output spans orchestral, chamber and vocal music, with a particular reputation for large-scale choral and vocal works that engage directly with questions of faith, identity and history — The Passion of Yeshua sits within that broader body of work rather than as an isolated project. His music draws on a wide tonal and harmonic vocabulary without settling into a single easily labelled style, a flexibility that suits a work moving between dramatic narrative, reflective choral writing and moments of more overtly emotional intensity.

About the performers

JoAnn Falletta has served as the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s music director since 1999, building the ensemble’s reputation substantially through an active recording career — this Naxos disc is one of many the orchestra has made under her direction, several of which have themselves been Grammy-recognised. Pairing the Buffalo forces with the UCLA Chamber Singers for a work of this choral scale and demand reflects a fairly common practice for large-scale American choral premieres, where a resident orchestral chorus is supplemented by a specialist vocal ensemble to meet the full requirements of the score.

About the work’s structure

The Jewish framing runs through the work’s own vocabulary for its fourteen movements, spread across two discs: it opens with “Pesach” — Passover, the meal at the story’s centre — rather than a generically titled “Last Supper,” and its account of Peter’s denial is headed “Kefa’s Denial,” using the Aramaic form of the name rather than its later Greek-derived Christian rendering. The sequence moves through Gethsemane, Yeshua’s appearance before Pilate, and the Via Dolorosa toward a closing “Epilogue,” a shape recognisably similar to the traditional Passion narrative’s structure but consistently named and framed from within the story’s own original setting rather than through the terminology later Christian tradition attached to it.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic — it’s new coverage of a real, well-documented recording, not part of the site’s recovered archive from its original run as an Edinburgh CD shop between 1991 and 2018. Every fact here has been independently verified rather than assumed.