Lagasca’s singing was an outpouring of devotion

“The emotional apex of the performance came immediately after the death of Jesus with bass-baritone Enrico Lagasca’s singing of ‘Mache dich, mein Herze rein’. It is one of the wonders of the St. Matthew Passion how Bach expressed the meaning of the simplest of texts, often childlike in their directness and innocence, in music so profound. Lagasca’s singing of the many repetitions of ‘Ich will Jesus selbst begraben’ in the aria, accompanied by the plaintive sounds of two oboe da caccia, was an outpouring of devotion and grief as elegant as it was moving.”