More Than One Way Poem by gershon hepner

There’s more than one way to perform
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion,
there’s no right way, or even norm,
for style resembles fashion,
changes every season of the year
if you, like Bach, can view
the music coming to your ear
with every measure new,
and not encrusted by tradition,
or dogma that’s scholastic,
it welcomes your own intuition,
if you’re enthusiastic
about a dialogue not with the Lord
but with Johann Sebastian,
whose music answers won’t afford
till you ask your own question.

Matthew Gurewitsch writes about performances of Bach’s B Minor Mass and the St. Matthew Passion by the Netherlands Bach Society (“Playing the Numbers When Putting Voice to Bach, ” NYT, April 15,2007) :
The Netherlands Bach Society’s signature piece has always been “St. Matthew Passion, ” which it performs every year during Holy Week. To keep the experience fresh not only for himself but also for the players and for audiences, Mr. van Veldhoven maintains a policy of bringing in guest conductors every other year. Often the choices are renowned early-music specialists who have never conducted the work before, as was the case for Ton Koopman and René Jacobs. Performances are held daily through Holy Week in the Grote Kerk (Great Church) of the fortress town of Naarden, outside Amsterdam, beginning at 11 a.m. and ending at 5 p.m. A long intermission leaves time for a picnic on the picturesque city walls. Atzo Nicolai, the longtime minister for government reform and kingdom relations, attends every Good Friday — a working day in the Netherlands — along with almost a dozen colleagues from the cabinet. “ ‘St. Matthew’ during Holy Week is bigger in the Netherlands than ‘Messiah’ at Christmas anywhere else, ” Mr. Nicolai said recently from his office in The Hague. “I started attending at Naarden as a little boy with my parents. Personally I’m not religious at all. But listening to religious music with your colleagues from the government, you share a lot, something deeper than religion in my view. It’s an interesting moment of reflection.” The conductor this year was the British harpsichordist, organist and conductor Richard Egarr, a frequent guest of the society, who chose to perform a recently published early version of “St. Matthew” rather than the familiar edition. Because of its long history, Mr. Egarr said from his home in Amsterdam, he feels the society is unafraid to look backward as well as forward. “A lot of performances by early-music ensembles in recent years have gone in for streamlining, making everything faster, more furious, more rigid, ” he said. “From my point of view that’s very undesirable. I started out as a boy chorister at York Minster. My starting point is flexibility, sense of spontaneity.” In any case “authenticity” is not everything. Mr. van Veldhoven said: “I’m very interested in facts, but I don’t want to be a conservator and do exactly what Bach did. A good performance uses a framework of knowledge. But within that framework there’s freedom. So many musicians are trained to think of the composer as God, who had the truth in his pen — one single truth, and only one. The composer isn’t God. He’s a friend you can talk to.”


4/15/07