John Eliot Gardiner, together with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, adds a new reading of J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion to his remarkable legacy of recordings for Deutsche Grammophon. Boasting a team of exceptional young soloists and choral singing hallmarked by intense drama, expressive nuance and spellbinding musicianship, the album was recorded in the ornate surroundings of Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre on Good Friday 2021. It is set for release on 4 March 2022 as a deluxe edition consisting of 2 CDs and a Blu-ray disc which offers the audio recording and the film of the performance in various sound formats, including the immersive Dolby Atmos. The audio recording will also be released digitally. The critically acclaimed performance, sung from memory, was originally streamed live on DG Stage. “The crowd choruses were thrillingly delivered,” noted The Times (London). “Even better was the way Gardiner shaped every word of the chorales for maximum emotional impact.” Seen and Heard International praised the conductor for building “cumulative tension” across the work’s two parts, while Bachtrack’s five-star review judged his interpretation to be “operatically gripping, concentrated and true to life” and summed up the event as “an Easter miracle from Oxford”.