J.S. Bach: St Matthew Passion, Pygmalion / Raphaël Pichon

Raphaël Pichon’s recording of Bach’s St Matthew Passion with his period-instrument ensemble Pygmalion, released on Harmonia Mundi, won the Choral Award at the Gramophone Classical Music Awards 2022. It’s one of the largest works in the choral repertoire, scored for double choir and double orchestra, setting the Passion narrative from Matthew’s Gospel across two extended parts, and a work with a correspondingly long and closely scrutinised recorded history, which makes a new account winning outright a genuine result rather than a formality.

About the work

The St Matthew Passion, BWV 244, is among Bach’s largest and most demanding choral-orchestral works, composed for Good Friday services in Leipzig and structured around the Gospel narrative of Christ’s arrest, trial and crucifixion, interspersed with chorales, arias and turba (crowd) choruses that comment on the unfolding story. Its scale, two distinct choirs and orchestras, a large roster of vocal soloists, and a performance that typically runs close to three hours, makes it one of the most substantial single works any choral ensemble can take on, and one where recorded interpretations vary widely in tempo, scale and the balance between dramatic intensity and liturgical restraint.

About the performers

Raphaël Pichon founded Pygmalion in 2006 while still a student, and has built it since into one of the most closely watched period-instrument ensembles working in French and German Baroque repertoire, with a substantial existing Bach discography on Harmonia Mundi. This recording draws on an unusually large and well-matched roster of soloists, tenor Julian Prégardien as the Evangelist, baritone Stéphane Degout, sopranos Sabine Devieilhe and Hana Blažíková, alto Lucile Richardot, tenor Reinoud Van Mechelen, countertenor Tim Mead, tenor Emiliano Gonzalez Toro and bass-baritone Christian Immler among them, reflecting the scale of casting the work demands when done with a soloist for essentially every named role rather than doubling parts.

What’s notable about this account

Pichon and Pygmalion’s approach sits within the historically informed performance tradition, period instruments, forces scaled closer to what Bach himself would likely have had available in Leipzig, and tempos and phrasing informed by that scholarship, rather than the larger, more Romantic-scaled approach some earlier recordings took. Within that broader HIP tradition, though, the St Matthew Passion still allows for real differences in how dramatically or how devotionally a conductor shapes the narrative, and it was specifically this recording’s account of that balance that the Gramophone panel singled out for the Choral Award in 2022, ahead of a strong field of rival period-instrument and mixed-forces recordings.

A crowded field to win outright

Bach’s Passions have been recorded by nearly every major period-instrument ensemble of the last half-century, alongside a long earlier tradition of larger-scale, modern-instrument accounts, meaning any new recording of the St Matthew Passion enters one of the most thoroughly documented corners of the entire recorded classical catalogue. Winning the Gramophone Choral Award outright against that back-catalogue, rather than simply receiving a favourable review, is a stronger claim than it might look at first: the panel was judging this account not in isolation but directly against decades of well-regarded prior recordings of the same work.

A note on this page

This is a freshly written review of a real, current recording, written to extend mmmusic’s coverage of significant classical releases into what’s actually being recorded and recognised today, it isn’t part of the archive recovered from the site’s original 1991–2018 run. Every fact here has been independently verified rather than assumed.