JS Bach’s masterpiece - St Matthew Passion On Saturday 6 April Bury Bach Choir will sing the St Matthew Passion in St Edmundsbury cathedral, Bury St Edmunds, accompanied by five wonderful soloists – Robert Murray, Graeme Danby, Valerie Reid, Fae Evelyn and Tom Asher, with the Suffolk Baroque Players and the cathedral’s Boy Choristers. St Edmundsbury Cathedral Bach’s musical inheritance was rich with the accumulated wealth of many centuries, nowhere more so than in his settings of the story of Christ’s Passion, whose history is one of gradually evolving elaboration and complexity. Of the five Passions listed in Bach’s obituary only two survive: the St John (1724, revised 1725) and the St Matthew, which probably received its first performance in 1727 and was certainly sung on 15 April 1729, as part of the already lengthy Good Friday service at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche. It was on an altogether vaster scale, not just in duration, but in its whole conceptio...