A day of passion at the Proms
The musical legacy resulting from the Reformation is stupendously rich
The Proms has never been afraid to tackle a big theme, and on Sunday it tackled one of the biggest imaginable – the birth of the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago. The musical legacy of that upheaval is stupendously rich. At its core are the cantatas and the Passions of JS Bach, plus his religiously inspired organ music. Then there are Bach’s great German forebears, extending back to the great reformer Martin Luther himself, and his contemporaries and successors, such as Mendelssohn.
To do justice to all this in a single day seems a tall order, but the Proms pulled it off by focusing on the most distinctive Protestant musical genre, the Passion (the narrative of Christ’s trial and Crucifixion). The afternoon concert from the BBC Singers and City of London Sinfonia offered
A Patchwork Passion, which told the story through an ingenious stitching together of excerpts from Passions composed across the centuries. As Christ’s story moved towards its climax, so the musical style changed from the sturdy simplicity of Lutheran-era German music to Baroque expressivity, then to Romantic drama and (this was quite a jolt) to anguished Modernism. In the evening, we had Bach’s St John Passion, from Scotland’s premier Baroque ensemble, the Dunedin Consort, directed by John Butt.
The Passion theme allowed the curators to skirt around the delicate topic of whether Anglican church music really belongs in a celebration of Protestantism (though there were tastes of that tradition here and there, from Handel and John Stainer). And it also allowed them to be ecumenical: we heard music by Catholic composers Joseph Haydn and James Macmillan, and two Russian Orthodox composers, Sofia Gubaidulina and Arvo Pärt.
All of this made for something rich and moving. William Whitehead’s dancing and joyful performance of Bach’s St Anne organ prelude was a treat, but it did highlight a problem with the overall conception. Devoting the day to Passions was historically unimpeachable, but it left the impression that Protestants are always on their knees, musically speaking. You would never have guessed that Martin Luther valued music mainly because it cheered the soul.