Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment/Rattle, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

Mad manners as the Passion rattles along

Keenly anticipated and completely sold out, this QEH performance of Bach's St John Passion under Sir Simon Rattle proved, in the event, distinctly peculiar. Despite the panoply of period instruments of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, it seemed at first that we were in for an old-fashioned account after the Romantic tradition of Mengelberg. The opening chorus was singularly lacking in urgency and dense in texture, with the seething mass of 22 strings and the 24 members of European Voices "moulded" in long crescendos and diminuendos that virtually neutralised Bach's lacerating woodwind clashes.

Then, with the first of the crowd-chorus interventions, the tempo dashed away at an "authentic" clip to outdo Sir John Eliot Gardiner – indeed, some of the irruptions during the Part II interrogation of Jesus were so fast as to reduce Bach's rhythmic detail to a scramble. Yet, in between, the chorales were dissected almost chord by chord, with repeated little commas and crescendos for verbal emphasis. And so the performance unfolded in a strange mix of the traditional, the "historically informed" and, it has to be said, the maddeningly mannered.

Other oddities included assigning the bass arias and dramatic roles to one singer, so that David Wilson Johnson found himself singing both Jesus and Pilate in the trial scene – taxing even his histrionic powers. A contrabassoon was included in the continuo group, presumably as a deep extension to the chamber organ, but it wheezed weirdly beneath such numbers as the bitter-sweet little bass arioso with two viola d'amore and lute, "Betrachte, meine Seel" (and why was the organ player allowed to throw herself around all evening as if she were playing Rachmaninov?). More puzzling still, and for all his solicitude and skill, was the curious failure of Ian Bostridge's Evangelist to transfix the ear. Maybe he had been placed too far upstage.

There were rewards, of course. Both the soprano Rosemary Joshua and the tenor Mark Padmore found a touching vein of inwardness in their arias. Indeed, the latter's flowing "Erwäge, wie sein blutgefärbter Rücken" was perhaps the evening's highlight, while the countertenor Michael Chance's mesmeric "Es ist vollbracht!" was exquisitely counterpointed by Sarah Cunningham's spectral gamba.

The reception was duly rapturous, and it is no pleasure to criticise Sir Simon, who had doubtless thought deeply about the work. But too many of his interpretative interventions seemed to interfere with the unfolding line of the music. One sensed a conductor trying to create a role for himself in a score that does not really need it.