"I was doing so much as a recording artist," he wrote in an e-mail, "that I started to feel the need to get away from it and get back to my true passion, performing.
For their second performance, Passion Pit performed "Carried Away".
This is a small but beautifully thought-out piece of work, a sea-bleached story told with passion and performed with real dynamism.
Since the 19th century the word taʿziyyah has referred in particular to passion plays performed by lay actors enacting the sufferings of the 12 Shīʿite imams.
Arvo Pärt's 1982 setting of the St John Passion is performed relatively rarely, perhaps because it doesn't translate so well to the secular environment in which most art and music is appreciated nowadays.
But in "The Little Match Girl Passion" (reverently performed by Paul Hillier's Theatre of Voices, on Harmonia Mundi), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2008, he uses Bach's St. Matthew Passion as a model in musicalizing Hans Christian Andersen's parable of a poor girl who freezes to death on a city street on New Year's Eve.
Mr. Masur took a traditional approach, adopting a measured and almost unvarying tempo for the chorales, which served as a reminder that in Bach's day the chorales were almost surely sung by the entire congregation when the Passion was performed in church.
He goes on a pilgrimage to Louisiana State Penitentiary, the notorious converted plantation better known as Angola, ostensibly to see a Passion play performed by the inmates, but also with the hope that associating with penitent murderers and felons will help him grasp "the problem of violence".
The Passion was performed on the South Bank terrace on Easter Saturday 1977, with Christ crucified among tourists, and, by 1985, had become a creation-to-doomsday trilogy, memorable for Brian Glover confirming, as many from the county had long believed, that God was a Yorkshireman.
The following tables give an overview of version I of the Passion, first performed in 1724.
The church has invited people to, "travel the Stations of the Cross online and be part of a worldwide audience - via cell phone, Blackberry, iPhone, or other Internet connection - for what may be the world's first Passion Play performed through the social networking application Twitter".
