The story of Christ’s final days is often told in plays and music. These works are called passions, and on Saturday at Chicago’s Holy Family Church, the public can hear what’s arguably the most ambitious of them all. It’s Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, a work so complicated, it’s sometimes described as a monster.

Sound of chairs

The rehearsal of the Chicago Chorale is about to start, so it’s time for choristers to set up folding chairs. They also run the box office and web site. It’s the choristers who suggested tackling the St. Matthew Passion.

Conductor Bruce Tammen’s first reaction was somewhere between a gasp and a groan.

TAMMEN: These people don’t know what they’re getting into. They’re going to see a side of me they haven’t seen before.

The St. Matthew Passion is nearly 3 1/2 hours long.

TAMMEN: You have two concert masters, and you have two full sets of strings and winds, and you have two choruses singing back and forth to each other, sometimes coming together. And in addition to that, there’s a treble chorus that sings in a couple of the movements, so I’m cueing three different groups simultaneously.

The chorus not only sings hymns called chorales, it plays several different roles. Here, the choir acts as Jesus.

Choir

TAMMEN: They have to change character all the time and have to come in bam, just like that. I turn to them, and give them a sign. It’s time to be a disciple, or it’s time to be a crowd of angry people. You have to be very fast on your feet.

Choir

The full St. Matthew Passion isn’t tackled by amateurs all that often. But these singers aren’t typical amateurs. The Chorale is based in Hyde Park and draws many of its members from the University of Chicago. They’re graduate students, doctors, attorneys, music teachers and church musicians. Many sang in college choirs.

TAMMEN: It’s the kind of atmosphere where the people want to do the very best and the very biggest. They like to really get their hands into that which is most significant.

Tammen, who’s also the artistic director, is a professional singer himself.

TAMMEN: I have a very strong feeling that great music should not be reserved for professional musicians. And more and more that is what happens. We pay good money to go to concerts, we buy CDs, we listen to the radio, and we experience our music vicariously.

Choir

MARTY: St. Matthew Passion is usually seen as the peak of the entire religious career of Bach.

Martin Marty is professor emeritus at University of Chicago, and he’s speaking before the performance. He’s also the son of a church organist, and jokes that he’s a Bach groupie.

MARTY: He compresses his musical art, his piety, his theology and his grief, all in one program.

It’s believed that Bach wrote four different passions, but only two survived. No one performed the St. Matthew Passion after Bach’s death until Felix Mendelssohn revived it.

MARTY: People paid no attention to it at all. It was not really appreciated in his time.

Today, the passion is performed around the world. Yet it’s not become as well known as seasonal staples like Handel’s Messiah. Marty says that’s because it’s not accessible. Anyone who goes shopping near Christmas is familiar with the Hallelujah Chorus.

MARTY: Messiah is not easy come, easy go, but it’s more easily come, more easily gone. Whereas this makes demands, and like everything in life, where there are higher demands, you have a deeper investment, and I think it goes deeper and lasts longer.

TAMMEN: You’re not supposed to like it, you’re supposed to sit through it and consider your sins and then go into Easter determined to be a better person.

Again, Bruce Tammen:

TAMMEN: The St. Matthew Passion was composed to be presented within a long 5-to-6-hour liturgy on Good Friday afternoon.

The passion is also costly to mount. There’s the double chorus and double orchestra. And Tammen says the Chorale is hiring professionals for the leading roles.

TAMMEN: Everybody wants to go to Messiah. You hang out a shingle that says Messiah, 3 p.m. , they’ll be there. St. Matthew is a little different. Most people have heard of it. But most people haven’t really seriously considered going to it. We’ve worked very hard to build audience for it, and that costs a lot of money.

Yet he thinks it’s well worth it.

TAMMEN: When you participate in this, you find the channels in your brain being righted. You just feel like a smarter person, you feel more moral, you think about deeper questions.

Choir

Despite the difficulties, it’s been Tammen’s dream to conduct it, and for the choir, to perform it.

I’m Lynette Kalsnes, Chicago Public Radio.

Choir

The Chicago Chorale and Music of the Baroque are both performing St. Matthew Passion this season.