UNDYING 'PASSIONS' : From Bach to Carmen Miranda.

While new musical compositions of the Passion went out of style by the nineteenth century, recently there has been an unexpected--and largely unexplained--revival of the genre. It began in the aftermath of World War II, after midcentury catastrophies compelled composers to investigate the genre as an emotional necessity.

Apart from some obscure and apparently unrecorded works by German composers like Heinrich von Herzogenberg (d. 1900) and Ernst Pepping (d. 1981), the first modern Passion to make a lasting impact was that of the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki (b. 1933). His 1965 Saint Luke Passion has just received a splendid new recording on MDG (337 0981-2). Penderecki combines Gregorian chant with modern musical techniques (bunching notes into "noise clouds") in a compelling way rarely since achieved, despite renewed popular interest in chant. Inspired by World War II, Penderecki wanted to advance an explicitly Christian work. The concept was highly controversial in Soviet bloc countries of the day. Despite its grandiose use of large orchestra and chorus, at just under seventy minutes the Penderecki work fits neatly onto one CD, as does Estonian composer Arvo Part's archaic-sounding 1982 Johannes-Passion on Finlandia (8573-87182-2), described here in a previous review (November 23, 2001).

Both longer and more ambitious is the Norwegian church composer Trond Kverno's 1986 Saint Matthew Passion, recently released on Aurora (ACD 4994), with the stellar British tenor Ian Partridge singing the role of Evangelist. Penderecki uses a full orchestra and contrasts modern dissonances with Gregorian chant; Kverno wrote his Passion for voices alone, which makes for an extraordinarily intimate experience. Kverno explains that composers of Passions in the Baroque era, like Bach, focused "on the sufferings of Jesus as an individual," whereas he aimed at expressing a "more universal suffering," and consciously tried to "distance" his work from its audience by using a Latin text. Nevertheless, powerful emotions break through.

The Bach Year in 2000 sparked renewed interest in Passions, particularly since Helmut Rilling's Stuttgart-based Internationale Bachakademie commissioned a new setting of each of the four gospels. Now that the dust has settled, it can be said that the most successful of these, by far, was the seventy-year-old Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina's Saint John Passion. It can be heard, dynamically conducted by Valery Gergiev, on Hanssler (98.405). A massive choral structure with thundering organ accompaniment, Gubaidulina's Passion juxtaposes texts from the Gospel of John and the Apocalypse. Her goal, no less, was "an attempt at revealing the word of God," and although deeply inspired by the Orthodox choral tradition (like Part), her work is also infinitely dramatic, even operatic, in its thrust and verve, despite her disclaimers in the CD's liner notes that the Orthodox Church rejects theatricality and artifice in compositional effects, prefering the "art of direct experience."

Yet Gubaidulina's mastery, familiar from other excellent recordings of instrumental pieces, as in Music for Flute, Strings, and Percussion (EMI, 2435571532), makes her Passion both a direct and evocative experience. Fascinated early on by rare Russian, Caucasian, and Asian folk and ritual instruments, Gubaidulina ran afoul of Soviet anti-Western prejudices in the 1960s, as did Penderecki. A kind of musical mystic, she was allowed to travel to the West only after glasnost in 1985, although advocates like violinist Gidon Kremer had already made her visionary works, such as her violin concerto Offertorium, familiar worldwide. Since she first came to America in 1987 as a guest of Louisville's Sound Celebration, Gubaidulina has returned to festivals in Boston, Vancouver, and Tanglewood. Another recent premiere of the highest interest was her passionately lovely 1999 work, Two Paths ("A Dedication to Mary and Martha") for two solo violas and orchestra, first performed by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Kurt Masur.

Of the other three Passions, German composer Wolfgang Rihm's Deus Passus, based on Saint Luke (Hanssler CD, 98397) is a valiant, if somewhat predictable, exercise in German avant-garde vocabulary, while a yet-to-be-released recording of the young China-born Tan Dun's imaginative Water Passion, after Saint Matthew, languishes in the vaults of SONY Classical. Finally, there is forty-one-year-old Argentinean Osvaldo Golijov's Passion According to Saint Mark, which is all too available (Hanssler CD, 98.404). This work, the liner notes tell us, is meant to take place "on a street in South America" where Jesus "is a black person, of course." As a result, the listener is subjected to gratuitous flamenco and samba rhythms, Cuban drums, a "South American brass band," and that most tedious of all tourist spectacles, Brazilian karate-like Capoeira dancers. For Golijov, three wildly kicking dancers "are caesuras for the three divisions of the Passion," and one can hardly be amazed, given the state of musical criticism in America today, that this hodgepodge of local color delighted the critics of the New Yorker and the New York Times. Had Carmen Miranda herself appeared onstage as The Savior, there might have been standing ovations from the press. Perhaps the critical assessment of an anonymous Amazon.com customer who actually paid money for Golijov's work says it best: "Dreadful! This tops my list of worst recording of 2001."

Nevertheless, thanks to the lasting accomplishments of Penderecki and Gubaidulina, the Passion genre can be said to be once again alive and well in concert and church performances.