Johann Sebastian Bach – Bálint Karosi: St. Mark Passion
Organist and composer Bálint Karosi (1979) served from 2015 as organist and music director at St. Peter’s Church in Midtown Manhattan, New York for almost a decade. He currently lives in Philadelphia and teaches as a part-time lecturer at Yale University in New Haven. As a composer, Karosi takes a keen interest in early, historical instruments – be it the harpsichord, the Baroque oboe, the recorder, the clarinet or the viola da gamba –, and is fascinated by the new sonic opportunities these instruments offer for contemporary music.
The congregation in New York boasts a long tradition of performing the Passion on Good Friday. On these occasions, Johann Sebastian Bach’s (1685–1750) two Passions, ‘St. John Passion’ and ‘St. Matthew Passion’, have been performed several times. Under Karosi’s musical direction a historically founded approach has become the defining feature of these Passion performances. When the idea arose to create a reconstruction of Bach’s ‘St. Mark Passion’, the composer’s ambition to produce the musical reconstruction and the musical director of St. Peter’s Church’s plans to refresh the Church’s musical repertoire got combined.
Bach’s passion music, based on the Gospel of St. Mark, was premiered in Leipzig on 23rd March 1731. The music of the work has been lost, but the libretto, written by Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici), has survived. Furthermore, it is also known that Bach used music borrowed from his earlier works for the arias and the larger choral pieces of this passion music.
Bálint Karosi’s version was premiered in New York on 7th April 2023. In keeping with the congregation’s customs, the arias were performed in German while the chorale verses and biblical texts (recitatives, turba choruses) were sung in English. Karosi did not borrow the music for the latter, nor did he attempt to imitate Bach’s style. Instead, he developed the music for it in his own style. A review of the New York-based performance also highlighted that “Karosi’s reimagining of the missing parts of St. Mark Passion is in a distinctively modern, contemporary musical language—his experimentation can find comparisons in jazz and American minimalism. By contrasting the musical language of the additive passion narrative to that of Bach’s arias and chorales, Karosi creates transparency within the composition. The audience knows immediately what is historical and what is new, all while being immersed in a cohesive musical whole.” The audience listening to the first version of the music could easily navigate the musical flow, which evoked different periods of music history: the alternation between English and German sections created a clear-cut and easy-to-interpret situation for the listeners. At the Budapest performance, however, even the sections originally sung in English will now be performed in German, which necessitated a complete musical reworking of the 2023 version. Stylistically, of course, the two historical layers remain so distinct that the audience will always be aware of which composer’s music is being performed at any given moment.
When orchestrating the reconstruction, Karosi took the ensemble of the piece entitled ‘Mourning Ode’ (Laß, Fürstin, laß noch einen Strahl /Let, Princess, let still one more glance/) as his starting point. Thus, in his version too, two oboes d’amore, two Baroque flutes, a string ensemble and violas da gamba form the basis of the musical sound while the continuo features a harpsichord alongside the organ.
Of course, in most cases it is also a hypothetical question which of his earlier works Bach reused in his arias. In the case of two arias, Karosi deviated from the approach adopted in most reconstructions. The bass aria in the second movement (‘Welt und Himmel nehmt’) is often sung to the music of the aria from the cantata ‘Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam’ (BWV 7). In Karosi’s version, however, the aria beginning with the words ‘Himmel reiße, Welt erbebe’, written for the second version of ‘St. John Passion’ dating from 1725, is performed. In addition, it may seem a surprising choice that, for one of the soprano arias, Karosi used the music from the airy and graceful soprano aria ‘Gott, wie dein Name, so ist auch dein Ruhm’ (BWV 171) accompanied by a solo violin.
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J. S. Bach – Bálint Karosi: St. Mark Passion
OCT 21., 8 PM
Matthias Church
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photo: Mária Lökösházi ©Raffay Zsófi
Written by music historian Szabolcs Molnár