In performing Ernst Peppings Passionbericht des Matthäus for a capella chorus in 2008, the Radio Choir came face to face with Germany’s past. Ernst Pepping adamantly refused to join the Nazi Party, but he was on the list of the so-called ‘divinely gifted’. He taught military musicians at university, but soon withdrew into the protective twilight of Spandau’s church music. In order to survive he made compromises, but he tried to make himself politically invisible. His Matthew Passion is filled with the tension between hope and forgiveness, the need to remember and the horror of a betrayal, which was witnessed by everyone, even if they did not, like Peter, participate out of fear.
Ernst Pepping rejected Johann Sebastian Bach’s old model of the Passion, because he knew that the narrator of the catastrophe could not be a single person. Every German was a witness and shared in the problem. The Evangelist is not sung by a soloist, but rather by a collective. And the crucified martyr is not a single person but many. The last words of Pepping’s Passionsberichtes des Matthäus, ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’, are repeated again and again and evoked like a mantra.
The renowned Berlin documentary theatre specialist Hans-Werner Kroesinger made use of all the means at his disposal to portray a fatal history of salvation, a reflection on the period of the work’s creation and on the media of historical memory – score and sound, paper and aesthetic experience. The performance was conducted by Stefan Parkman..
A CD of the performance was produced by Coviello Classics and was released in February 2008. In 2009 it was awarded the ‘Diapason d’Or’ by the renowned French music magazine Diapason.
PRESS REVIEWS
Director Kroesinger breaks up the chorus into groups. Stefan Parkman provides a crystal-clear, highly expressive realization, which loses nothing of its overpowering anguish without the visual element. The stunned audience was overcome with emotion...a long, tense silence gripped the hall following the last notes.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The narrative energy that this chorus radiates is enormous. One cannot help being gripped by it.
Frankfurter Rundschau
It could not be sung with greater focus, differentiation or intensity than by the ensemble under Stefan Parkman’s direction. This performance opens the way for a re-encounter with this work and a re-evaluation of it that are sure to have consequences. Phenomenal.
Der Tagesspiegel
An evening of resonating power.
Berliner Zeitung
Painful intensity...There was not a trace of grandiloquence in this interpretation of the Passion which Pepping felt impelled to write in that guilt-ridden time...The Rundfunkchor cannot be praised highly enough for having brought it back to public awareness.
opernwelt
The Passionsbericht des Matthäus emerged in Hans-Werner Kroesinger’s direction as a great event, probing the historical circumstances and, with utmost tact and sensitivity, making them contemporary…sung with absolute perfection under Stefan Parkman.
Musik und Kirche
A technically brilliant and musically compelling interpretation.
Neue Chorzeit
Disarming sonorous beauty, immaculate intonation and perfect blend.
Rondo
A stirring interpretation.
Deutschlandfunk
Rundfunkchor Berlin mastered the technical and interpretative demands with consummate flexibility…a momentous, concentrated interpretation of a work of great value.
klassik.com
