St. Matthew’s Passion – Usher Hall
The second Passion of the 2024 Edinburgh International Festival, following on immediately from the opening night Concert, Osvaldo Gilijov’s extraordinaryLa Pasio Segun San Marcos,a reinterpretation of Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion from 2000.
However, tonight too is a reworking of Bach’s original masterpiece. The young Felix Mendelssohn transformed Johann Sebastian Bach’s majestic St Matthew Passion for modern orchestra. We hear his (rarely performed) groundbreaking arrangement from Leipzig 1841. Arguably this changed the course of music history, and without it the great Bach revival of the 19th Century might never have happened.
There would surely have been an argument to host a third Passion, the original, using baroque instruments, which would sound very different again. A...