Five minutes into the performance, and it was clear that this was going to be quite some Passion. Bach's St John Passion, even more than the more perfectly balanced St Matthew, tosses the listener between the emotions of pity and fear with a sometimes violent unpredictability. It was this oscillation, perfectly judged, never overdone, which distinguished Good Friday's performance by Polyphony at St John's, Smith Square, under the baton of Stephen Layton.
Layton, who conducts with minimal, close-focused hand movement, made the strings (a dozen of them) lie low in the dark waves of the opening, rising up to the surface through an almost imperceptible crescendo into the shock of the chorus's fierce and desperate cry of "Herr!".
The imprecatory opening chorus seemed an intense, corporate murmur of pleading, taking easy shape and inflection from its words, without ever over-marking their rhythm. The chorales, too - those moments of corporate, possibly originally congregational reflection - flowed as effortlessly as their distant plainsong antecedents. They, too, could be the vehicles of extreme emotions. After the smiting of Christ by the Officer, cunning pacing and balancing of the high-open textures brought bewilderment and fearful indignation to the simple couplets. The choir's 24 voices did little more than breathe their chorale contribution to the bass aria at the death of Christ: this was one of the real coups of this performance.
Both Layton and his Evangelist, Nigel Robson, made the most of the highly strung nerves of recitative and dialogue. This was an Evangelist very much in the mould of the great German tenor Peter Schreier: in the style of heightened dramatic speech, addressed swiftly and surely to the audience.
Of the soloists, none was so totally at home with the German language as Robson. But for the power of sheer nonverbal expression, Joanna Levine's viola de gamba solo with contralto Sarah Conolly's aria, Es ist vollbracht! ("It is accomplished!"), took some beating.
Stephen Gadd was a concentrated plain-speaking Christus and Gavin Carr a no-nonsense Pilatus, while Catherine Bott, Mark Milhofer and particularly, Peter Harvey duetted eloquently in their arias with the orchestra's own soloists.