Edward Higginbottom
St John Passion

Timothy Brown
Rutter Requiem

Crouch End Festival Chorus
Patterson Hell’s Angels

THREE YEARS AGO the International Bach Academy celebrated the millennium in spectacular style by commissioning settings of the four Gospel Passion narratives from Sofia Gubaidulina, Wolfgang Rihm, Osvaldo Golijov, and Tan Dun. Gubaidulina’s St John Passion has made the most headway — last year there was a Prom performance — but all are worth attention, for aural and spiritual reasons.

None of them, obviously, will knock Bach off his perch. Two of music history’s biggest losses are his Luke and Mark Passions, neither of which survives complete; but that still leaves Matthew and John, settings of phenomenal strength, beauty and drama, and they’ll be hard to miss this week.

For musicians their ubiquity can be a comfort, a burden or a challenge. Paul McCreesh is a challenge man. He needs to tread where no one in modern times has trod before; so his Matthew Passion, performed with the Gabrieli Players on Archiv 474 200-2, is the work’s first recording to follow the principle, sanctioned by Bach, of one voice to a part. At Roskilde Cathedral in Denmark, McCreesh employs only eight singers (soloists included) and sprints through with dash and clarity. With this recording no ears are going to silt up with boredom.

A chorus of four makes an underpopulated crowd at the Crucifixion. At moments the soprano’s melodic line gets lost in the counterpoint. Yet there’s no denying the visceral impact of McCreesh’s chamber forces or much of the solo singing. Mark Padmore’s Evangelist shares the outstanding virtues of his concert performances, the tone modulating easily between conversational and highly charged, words felt in every syllable. Magdalena Kozená glories in her aria Erbarme dich, compensating for Susan Bickley’s weak account of another Passion-stopper, Können tränen. Give thanks, too, for the cathedral’s new organ, always characterful.

But the chief distinction of this set is its single-minded focus. The intimate scale and the blurred distinction between soloist and chorus bring a new level of integration to the recitatives, arias and chorales.

McCreesh knows exactly where he’s going and why: this is a tight, clean Matthew Passion, exactly right for an age wary of heavyweight piety. I found it most refreshing.

Jump to Naxos’s recording (8.557296-97) of the St John Passion by present and past members of New College, Oxford, and you enter a different world. Note for note, this Passion is the more urgent and dramatic; but 34 voices, an overloaded acoustic and Edward Higginbottom’s oddly heavy-handed baton keep its flame burning low.

Some performance details — the slowish speeds, the chorales’ heavy swellings — stem from old traditions. But even this performance boasts an angle. Boys are used for the soprano parts, as in Bach’s time, even for the two arias, sung by the treble Joe Littlewood. Curiously, the emotionally demanding aria Zerfliesse, mein Herze is more successful than Ich folge dir gleichfalls: not many dancing steps there with Higginbottom’s weighty beat.

James Bowman’s alto contributions are pleasurable; James Gilchrist’s Evangelist and John Burnay’s big bluff Christ do no harm. But the irritations nag more and more, and make this set no substitute for its more expensive colleagues (John Eliot Gardiner on Archiv, from 1986, is still hard to beat).

Timothy Brown and the Clare College, Cambridge, choir are in happier form on their own Naxos CD (8.557130), devoted to John Rutter. Not a carol is in sight; instead the programme contrasts the dulcet Requiem of 1985 with a well-chosen mix of anthems and organ pieces. Here again novelty was sought: the Requiem, much recorded with orchestra, is presented for the first time with chamber forces (organ, cello, flute, oboe, harp, timpani and percussion). Their intimacies bring Fauré’s influence looming even larger than before.

More from British music’s conservative wing arrives on Deux-Elles DXL 1050, a disc of music by Paul Patterson. In the 1970s, stimulated by the Polish avant-garde, he wrote music to set teeth on edge; by 1983 he was writing choral works fit to be programmed in the Three Choirs Festival. His commission Mass of the Sea, reissued in a 1987 recording, passes through the ears without leaving much residue.

But Hell’s Angels of 1998 screams for attention with whistles, clattering, and every effect suitable for a text that see-saws between Satan’s crew and Harley-Davidsons burning up Highway 15. The Crouch End Festival Chorus, supported by string quartet and percussion, hurl out its theatrical simplicities with more enthusiasm than pin-prick precision, but everyone — this listener included — obviously had a good time.