It's incredible that a work considered as securely at the core of the Western musical canon as J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion didn't receive a complete recording until after the Second World War, and that prior to that, unabridged performances were exceptionally rare; even Mendelssohn's momentous 1841 Leipzig performance was heavily cut, and Mendelssohn's son reported that even so, much of the audience "fled yawning before it was over." The earliest nearly complete recording was made in 1941 with Leipzig's Gewandhaus ...
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It's incredible that a work considered as securely at the core of the Western musical canon as J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion didn't receive a complete recording until after the Second World War, and that prior to that, unabridged performances were exceptionally rare; even Mendelssohn's momentous 1841 Leipzig performance was heavily cut, and Mendelssohn's son reported that even so, much of the audience "fled yawning before it was over." The earliest nearly complete recording was made in 1941 with Leipzig's Gewandhaus Orchestra and Thomanernchor, and those same forces are brought together again, along with the Tölzer Knabenchor, in this 2009 performance led by Riccardo Chailly. The orchestra uses modern rather than period instruments, but Chailly is aware of the conventions of historically informed performance practice and deploys his forces with discretion, so the result is appropriately intimate, with the full forces reserved for moments like the overwhelming outbursts of the Crowd. The work is...
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