The Bach Choir brought this year's Passion season, as well as Brady Allred's 10-year stint as music director, to a close Friday with a concert of Johann Sebastian Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" at Carnegie Music Hall. Musical settings of texts from the four Gospels relating the events in the life of Christ from the Last Supper through the betrayal to the Crucifixion culminated in the "oratorio Passions" of the high Baroque, with Bach's St. Matthew being the paragon.

The work was a fitting choice for a farewell concert by Allred, who, among other accomplishments, tripled the choir's size. The monumental St. Matthew is set for two four-voice choirs, six soloists and an orchestra that's often divided into two parts, each having its own continuo and organ.

Allred maintained a precise, cohesive reading with his exact and expressive stick technique. He kept the tempi moving and the transitions smooth, making for a well-paced, fluid performance of a work that can become saturnine.

Central to a musical Passion setting is the Evangelist, the singer (usually a tenor) given the narrative and descriptive sections of the texts. The St. Matthew requires a unique species of tenor. Not only did Bach compose flowing, wide-ranging melodic lines for the part, he loaded the lines with expressive contours and placed them in an excruciatingly high register. Richard Kennedy tackled the task nobly. Although showing some signs of vocal fatigue, he excelled in expressing the inherent drama and intense feelings of the Gospel texts.

The other soloists performed with varying degrees of proficiency. Soprano Carol Ann Allred (Brady's wife) sang with lyric sweetness. Mezzo-soprano Jan Wilson's voice was rich and colorful in the lower registers, but shrill in the top range.

Baritone Daniel Ihasz turned in a pedestrian performance in the role of Jesus. Tenor Gerald Thomas Gray sang his aria, "I Will Watch With My Jesus," with dramatic power, but lost vocal control in the melismas.

Bass-baritone Brent Stater proved why he is one of the region's most sought-after soloists. With effortless vocal production and exemplary diction, he imparted the perfect degree of angst to Peter's denial of Christ, then sang his second-act aria with exquisitely shaded nuance.

Allred selected an expanded pick-up orchestra of local professionals. The ensemble suffered from persistently bad tuning in the violins, but the nine members of the wind section played beautifully from start to finish.

Allred chose the recent Novello English translation of the original German, a translation that was often lost in the choral sections due to the choir's hit-and-miss diction.