In Wednesday’s (4/1) Guardian (U.K.), Tom Service writes, “The musical world’s present for Easter is Bach, Bach and more Bach. These next two days alone, there are performances of his St. Matthew Passion in every musical city you care to name … In the classical charts … one composer dominates more than any other … Why? Two descriptions of his music have particularly struck me … Bach the zombie and Bach the meat-grinder. The phrases belong to the violinist James Ehnes and the Guardian’s Clive Paget … Meat-grinding is how Paget describes the St. John Passion’s opening chorus; a fantastic expression of the viscera of human feeling … This is the darkness of the Passion story. But Bach’s music gives life and hope, as well as terrifying spiritual exorcism. That’s where the zombies come in…. The zombies that Ehnes meant … reference how Bach’s instrumental music can survive any amount of arrangement, recomposition and reimagination, and yet still communicate its essence. It is indestructible…. As the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, who performed the Goldbergs more than 90 times in a single year wrote for the Guardian, each performance is different, making a modern experience that feels ‘like a religious pilgrimage, or a conceptual work of art.’ ”
