St Matthew Passion
The choir, divided into two sections (“double choir”), sing some movements in which they represent the crowd of people in the story. Some of these movements, such as the opening one, are quite long, others are very short indeed. In some of these movements there is a vocal soloist, and the choir are commenting on what the soloist is singing about. In addition to the main choir there is a small choir which sings a chorale tune on top of the music during the first movement (this is called a “ripieno”). Sometimes a boys’ choir is used for this.