After a long break — six years or so — I have been spending a lot of time with Bach over the past weeks on two very contrasting projects: a St John and a St Matthew Passion. St John’s Gospel is, of the four, the most theologically-minded and mystical. Nevertheless, Bach makes of it, in his St John Passion, a work more deeply personal and thrustingly dramatic than the more monumental and later St Matthew Passion, the work which he consciously saw as part of his legacy.

In the John Passion, singing, as I do, the part of the Evangelist, the storyteller, it is very easy and, I think, proper to become involved in the act of narration and in the emotions of the narrative (though some people, misunderstanding the whole thrust of 18th-century German piety, find it vulgar). Bach takes very seriously the notion that St John was a witness to these events, a friend and disciple of Jesus Christ and the comforter of his mother. While the Matthew Passion’s narrative is just as dramatic, with as much tenderness, violence and passion, the greater number of reflective arias sung as if by present-day Christians who meditate on and participate in the drama both interrupt the narrative more and lend the whole work a more universal aspect.