Energy and power The Bach Collegium Japan performance of the St John Passion, experienced by KEITH BRAMICH EuroArts    DV-BAJPN

'Show us by Thy passion that thou, the true son of God, at all times, even in times of deepest lowliness, have been exalted!'

J S Bach would almost certainly have been astounded and intrigued to know that, 250 years after his death, a respected group of Japanese musicians would travel to his homeland to give concerts in his honour, and then, even stranger, that they would return to Asia and make a worldwide TV broadcast of the St John Passion [listen -- track 41, 'Durch dein Gefängnis'].

Bach wrote the St John Passion in 1724 for Good Friday at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, and performed it four times, making a different performing version on each occasion. These days a modern hybrid is normally used, but conductor Masaaki Suzuki makes use of Bach's fourth (1749) version (returning closest to the 1724 original) for this historic performance from Tokyo. The result is an accomplished and moving original instrument performance using excellent soloists from both Europe (notably German tenor Gerd Türk as the Evangelist, and brief, magical contributions from English countertenor Robin Blaze [listen -- track 59, 'Es ist vollbracht']) and Japan.

During a short video interview on the disc, Suzuki (a former student of Ton Koopman) comments on the success of Bach's message when transported to Japan, performed by Japanese people and broadcast internationally, and on the strong energy and power that he feels from Bach's music.

The production is excellent, and the camerawork fairly unobtrusive. The Suntory Hall audience is noticeably quiet (unlike the lunchtime concert I attended there last year -- see below), presumably not having been invited to join in the chorales, and distractions during this two-hour performance are minimal.

Sound and picture quality are also very good. Some visual artifacts are noticeable whenever there's fast movement -- look at Suzuki's right hand in the screen shot above to see this effect. This is fairly normal for compressed video formats, and it's only really a problem here during camera pans. Subtitles are available in English, French, Italian and Spanish, as well as the original German. Timing-wise, the English subtitles are spot-on, and I noticed only a couple of spelling mistakes.

I'm reviewing the EuroArts/TDK version packaged for DVD region 2 (Japan, South Africa, Europe), but it's also available for region 1 (Canada, USA and US territories) on the Image Entertainment label, although packaged, apparently, with less booklet information.

For help listening to the sound extracts here, please refer to our questions & answers page.

Record Box is Music & Vision's regular Saturday series of shorter CD reviews