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By Justin Davidson Staff Writer April 12, 2001 ST. MATTHEW PASSION. Music by J.S. Bach. Staged by Jonathan Miller. With Suzie LeBlanc, Phyllis Pancella, Daniel Taylor, Paul Agnew, Nils Brown, Andrew Schroeder and Stephen Varcoe. New York Collegium conducted by Paul Goodwin. Attended Tuesday night. Brooklyn Academy of Music Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St. Repeated tonight and tomorrow. IN A ROUGHENED and scarified theater in Brooklyn, a scruffy group in jeans and rumpled shirts acts out the story of Jesus' last days as if its members had just heard the news. Musicians and listeners circle a tiny O of stage. Though some have come to sing and others just to listen, Matthew's story and Bach's music seem to emerge from among us all in an intense and informal rite. A solo violinist and a countertenor stand consolingly over Peter as he regrets his three pusillanimous denials. The chorus slumps and yawns in a Gethsemane made of chairs, jumping up to overflow its ranks in times of grief and indignation. When Jonathan Miller's transfixing production of Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" first alighted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1997, I neglectfully managed to miss it, so I am grateful for its second coming. This time, it follows Peter Sellars' staging of two Bach cantatas, deliriously delivered by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and with these two events the sound of a great ice floe of convention cracking was heard in the land. Instead of voices squeezed from gowns and tuxedos, now there are characters, faith and pain. To call Miller's "Passion" staged is a semi-truth, since there are no sets, no costumes and only the barest props. To call it semi-staged is equally misleading, since there is nothing halfway about it. It is certainly not opera, which, with its footlights and greasepaint and yawning pit, exaggerates the distance between the bustling world onstage and the passive rows of patrons. It is a concert shorn of its starchy trappings, music given a vernacular veneer - and performed in English. Anyone who came to Bach first through this playful and profound experience would hardly guess at the tedious rigors to which he and his ilk are usually subjected. Those who object to the vulgarization of a sacred text recall those who insisted that the Bible be left in Latin. Surely Bach has nothing to fear from being better understood. It would all amount to no more than a gimmick if the music were not performed with such persuasiveness. Paul Goodwin, who helped conceive the project, conducted with all the urgency and devotion of a recent convert. His tempos never let grandeur get the better of drama, and the numbers nearly melted into each other, with each singer simply materializing from the shadows. Paul Agnew, an Evangelist in a slovenly T-shirt, sang even the "And he saids" with spontaneous pathos. Andrew Schroeder's Jesus was a man - manacled, terrified and proud, and possessed of a charismatic baritone. The New York Collegium, a band of elite early musickers who sometimes gather under that name and sometimes under others, played with sensitivity and zeal. The performance did have its nicks and ruts. A pair of period oboes remained immutably out of tune. Several vocal soloists coasted on the music's intrinsic beauty, without troubling to extract its expressive core. For all the fresh directness of Robert Shaw's English translation, the vowels sometimes turn too soft and round to be identified. The bread Jesus breaks at the Last Seder is an impermissibly fluffy loaf, not a brittle, unleavened sheet of Passover matzo. But even these imperfections had their place in a medium that eschewed slickness and that imbued a venerated masterpiece with a sense of sudden discovery.

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