Bach premiered his St Matthew Passion in Leipzig in 1827. Sixteen years later, the city gave birth to the ensemble that would become the Gewandhaus Orchestra. While the orchestra’s relationship with Bach’s music has not been continuous, its history lends its Bach performances a certain authority. Add the choir from Johann Sebastian’s own church, the St Thomas’s Boys Choir, its pedigree stretching back to the 13th Century, and you have extra authenticity by association.

So it turned out in this Palm Sunday performance. The Gewandhaus Orchestra was fairly large by contemporary standards but it achieved a crystalline transparency that clarified tiny details while giving full weight to mighty climaxes. If you judge an orchestra by its quiet moments, the Gewandhaus players are superb, but there is also power and rhythmic virtuosity.

The lads from St Thomas’s stood side by side with the Tölz Boys Choir, some 80 voices displaying a level of finesse and engagement that young singers rarely manage. Nor was it all sweetness and light; the vehemence of their baying for Christ’s blood was chilling. Among the soloists, Johannes Chum’s Evangelist sometimes buckled under the high-flying challenges that Bach threw at him, but Hanno Müller-Brachmann’s Christ was movingly restrained, his emotional reticence matched in Thomas Quasthoff’s all too brief contributions. For the rest, there were times when they seemed to be striving for an excess of feeling. Perhaps they should have taken a leaf from the choirs’ book.