Usher Hall
Edinburgh
October 1&2, 2026
Edinburgh, the threshfold of October 2026, and we are enjoying a brief spell of Indian summer. I arrived at the concert thoroughly intrigued by Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’. As a student of the Gospel, I had often wondered what this extraordinary story might become in the hands of an artist of Bach’s genius. I was not disappointed—and neither was my musician friend, who had brought his ten-year-old daughter to her first ever orchestral concert. I had persuaded him to bring her by telling him that the orchestra is, among other things, a place of female equality and empowerment, and that music remains one of the great universal levellers. Watching her encounter the orchestra for the first time added another dimension to the evening: before the music had even begun, there was something rather lovely about seeing a child being introduced to this extraordinary world of sound.
Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’ was written in 1727 for performance during the Good Friday services at St Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach had been cantor since 1723. It is one of his largest and most ambitious sacred works, scored for two choirs and two orchestras, alongside soloists and boys’ voices. Bach sets the Gospel account of Christ’s final days using the words of St Matthew, but surrounds the narrative with chorales, arias and reflective passages that invite the listener to respond emotionally to the events being described. The writing is remarkable for the way Bach combines immense contrapuntal complexity with moments of striking simplicity: voices and instruments interweave, echo one another and build huge musical structures, yet a single vocal line or quiet chorale can suddenly make the work feel intensely personal. The result is not simply a retelling of the Passion, but a carefully constructed musical meditation in which Bach uses every resource at his disposal to turn the biblical story into something dramatically and emotionally immediate.
One of the strongest impressions I took from the music is how unmistakably Northern European and Protestant its spiritual world feels. This is a very different Christianity from the icon-filled, flamboyant and often carnivalesque visual culture of Roman Catholicism: there is little sense of religious spectacle for its own sake. Instead, Bach’s Passion seems to turn inward, towards private reflection, conscience and contemplation. Its grandeur comes not from external decoration but from the extraordinary complexity of the music itself—from the interweaving voices, the chorales and the immense architecture of the score. Even at its most monumental, the work retains a sense of restraint and introspection. The result is a form of religious expression that feels austere without being cold: the drama is not played out through visual magnificence, but through the human voice and the listener’s own emotional and spiritual response.
The solo cast gives the performance a strong dramatic character, with each singer contributing a distinct presence to Bach’s unfolding narrative. Nick Pritchard’s Evangelist is at the centre of the performance, carrying the story forward with clarity and urgency, while Matthew Brook’s Jesus provides a contrasting sense of gravity and stillness. Roderick Williams brings authority to the role of Pilate, while Alex White’s bass gives Judas a darker, more troubled presence. The smaller roles are also carefully cast: Olivia Smith and Emily Hemp sing the maids, Hilary Cronin takes the soprano role, Jim Mewan sings the False Witness, and Pilate’s Wife adds another perspective to the unfolding drama.
What is particularly effective about this casting is the way Bach’s large-scale work is built from a series of individual human encounters. Rather than relying solely on the massed forces of the chorus and orchestra, the production repeatedly narrows its focus to individual voices, allowing the Passion to feel intimate as well as monumental. The contrast between Pritchard’s narrative role, Brook’s commanding presence as Jesus and the sharply characterised supporting parts gives the performance a genuine sense of theatre. With the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and its choral forces surrounding these individual voices, the production moves convincingly between public spectacle and private anguish—the scale of Bach’s conception never overwhelming the human drama at its centre.
Every part was played and sung with remarkable precision, but at the heart of the proceedings stood the conductor, Maxim Emelyanychev, seemingly conjuring the elements like a dark-age weathermancer. From the podium he appeared less to conduct the music than to summon it: shaping the great surges of sound, drawing sudden stillness from the orchestra and chorus, and then unleashing the full force of Bach’s architecture. His gestures could be fierce and commanding, yet they were equally capable of extraordinary delicacy. The effect was of a storm being controlled rather than merely endured—a sense that beneath the vast complexity of Bach’s score there was a single musical intelligence holding every current, gust and eddy in its grasp.
Seated in the Grand Circle, with a commanding view of the whole stage, I found the ‘St Matthew Passion’ an almost dreamlike, infectious experience. The melodies seemed relentless, continually unfolding and interweaving, never quite allowing the ear to rest. And in a distinctive space such as the Usher Hall, there was something almost uncanny about hearing Bach’s music fill the building: one could imagine Bach himself shedding a tear to hear his great work brought so vividly to life three centuries after it was written. The vocalists, delivering his libretto with voices that seemed to possess the strength and freedom of eagles in flight, gave the work an extraordinary human presence. Yes—a fine production indeed, and one that left the music feeling not like a relic of the past, but like something gloriously alive.
Damo Bullen