JS Bach Matthew Passion - Dunedin Consort - MusicWeb International

Peter Bright made this Recording of the Month in May, 2008 and I have no hesitation in following suit and placing this at the head of my recommendations of music for Holy Week.  As with Handel's Messiah, of which the same team have also made an excellent version, there is no one single definitive Matthew Passion - Bach made several revisions.  This is claimed as the only recording to use the final 1742 version.  For that reason alone it would be worth considering, but there is much more to it than that: I might prefer individual aspects of Gardiner's Archiv recording, but there is very little to choose between them.

The recording runs to 101 tracks: don't try to download each one manually - use Linn's splendid download manager.  Squeezebox placed tracks 100 and 101 between tracks 10 and 11 - renaming them 99A and 99B in Windows Explorer solved the problem.