St John Passion

Johanna Soller makes her London debut in Bach’s soulful St John Passion. The Artistic Director of the Munich Bach Choir has been praised for her unique combination of emotion, focused energy and intelligence.

The St John Passion is the earlier of Bach’s two surviving settings – although not necessarily his first work in the genre. A more intimate work than the St Matthew Passion, it distils Jesus suffering and sacrifice into a more direct narrative. In part this comes from the distinctive nature of the Gospel of John, with its deep-seated spiritual purity. The church authorities in Leipzig insisted that the Passion story and Jesus’ words could only be told according to the biblical text, but Bach pulls off a clever gambit by interpolating the gospel into a compilation of popular contemporary librettos, such as that by Barthold Heinrich Brockes that Handel and Telemann had set in the previous decade.

In 2023 Johanna Soller became the Music Director of the Munich Bach Choir and Bach Orchestra, the first woman to hold the position in its history. In 2019 she founded her own choir and period instrument ensemble, Capella Sollertia, with whom she organises the series Cantatum 1715 and is working on recording the complete cantatas of Johann Ludwig Bach. Johanna has worked with ensembles and choir including Nederlandse Bachvereniging, Munich Symphony Orchestra, the Dunedin Consort and the Orquesta de Córdoba, and she is also increasingly in demand as a musical director of opera.

Johanna Soller leads an outstanding cast of soloists, including former Rising Stars of the Enlightenment James Way and Helen Charlston along with tenor Jonathan Hanley, baritone Peter Edge and BBC Music Magazine Rising Star (2022) Hilary Cronin.