Notable recordings of Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew Passion (Matthäus-Passion) are shown below in a sortable table.
[1] There is a live recording of Serge Koussevitzky conducting a complete performance in Boston on Good Friday 1937, sung in English.
For this complex work, the limited pool of musicians available to Bach in Leipzig was divided between two choirs and orchestras plus a chorus of boy sopranos in the first movement.
Choirs I and II and the orchestras were physically separated,[2] and the dramatic nature of their interaction puts mono recordings at a disadvantage.
In the case of the Karl Münchinger stereo recording from 1964, the engineers not only captured spatial aspects of the performance in the Ludwigsburg Palace, but also made a conscious effort to give a different acoustic to each of three elements of time identified in Picander's libretto, the time-frame being divided into The work was first recorded by large choirs and orchestras.