Bach: St Luke Passion, BWV246

Though it isn't a genuine Bach work, those who love his music will want to investigate the St Luke Passion. In terms of scale, rhetorical intensity, structural and stylistic sophistication, musical invention and artistic ambition generally, it finds no common ground with his two extant Passions. But there's much that's intimate and touching about it. The meditative element comes less from contemplative arias than from a continuous and freshly fashioned narrative, although the arias, with their favoured wind obbligato parts, are often skilled and affecting. Wolfgang Helbich and his Bremen forces pitch the dramatic climate just about right throughout. Smoothly articulated, unmannered and technically accomplished, the chorales and turba scenes are especially well judged. The Evangelist, Rufus Müller, conveys the Gospel with soft-grained clarity and understated dignity and the other soloists do more than justice to the six arias.