John Butt reviews

Dunedin Consort/John Butt, et al (Linn)

‘John Butt’s deep grasp of Handel’s rhetoric and of large scale structure turns the work’s patchwork quality into a virtue’

One-to-a-part Bach infiltrated the St Matthew Passion with Paul McCreesh in 2002. I described him then as ‘provocative and compelling’, and John Butt is no less so. Of his eight remarkable singers (plus two unison sopranos for the opening chorus’ crowning chorale) several are barely out of college, but they match spine-tingling tone with astonishing maturity. Nicholas Mulroy as Evangelist has a powerful dramatic sense, sometimes floating free of Bach’s note-values – he’s mercilessly harsh when Jesus is spat upon – elsewhere meticulous: Peter’s weeping would move the hardest heart.