By JAMES OESTREICH [NY Times, 15 January 2007]

It seems remarkable at first glance that the annual weeklong Carnegie Hall choral workshops, founded by Robert Shaw in 1990, have only now gotten around to Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion,” perhaps the cornerstone of the Western choral literature. But anyone who attended any of the workshop sessions last week must have come away with a new appreciation of just how vast and varied a canvas the “St. Matthew” is, and how difficult to prepare in a mere six days with an ad-hoc chorus.