Easter approaches, and with it annual airings for Bach’s two great surviving Passion settings. Magdalen College Choir is performing the St John Passion, which could truly be said to have worked its way into the blood of Magdalen’s director of chapel music, Daniel Hyde.

“I sung it as a boy, then as a student I performed it many times, not only singing but playing continuo on the organ. So it’s a piece I know inside out. “I thought it was fun when I first sang it, because it wasn’t the everyday routine of singing services, it was something quite different. I don’t remember being scared of it at all – I think the great thing about introducing children to high culture is that they lap it up. They don’t have the anxieties that we accrue later in life. I’m the one who will be anxious when we come to perform the work on Easter Eve – anxious that the choir feels prepared and ready, and that I’m not going to hang them out to dry! Then they will do their best, and give a good performance.”

It’s often struck me that the St Matthew and the St John Passions are as near as Bach came to writing opera. But how does Dan Hyde put the music across to his choristers in rehearsal?

“I do teach it to the boys as a drama. Children have very active imaginations, so it’s not just a case of saying: ‘That’s a wrong note there, and you need to correct it to this,’ or ‘how do you read that?’ It’s a case of teaching them all the notes that they are going to have to sing and perform, but within the context of interpreting the music – to see how Bach has reacted to the texts he is setting. “The boys love it – we did it last year completely from scratch in the Sheldonian, and they just lapped it up. The trick is to trick them into not realising that they’ve done a lot of work on a big piece like this. If you start two weeks before, thinking: ‘Oh gosh, we’ve got to get through all this music’, then psychologically that’s not good. Whereas if you just drip-feed it gradually, that’s much better. And of course, there has to be humour and wit and pacing to the rehearsals – the mistake, which I’m probably guilty of in previous years, is to have the ideal finished product there in my head, and to expect it all to come together too quickly. The real knack is to pace the rehearsals so that it all peaks in the concerts.”

Dan Hyde is four years into the job of Informator Choristarum at Magdalen, to give his post its ancient Latin name, and his ambition to give the Magdalen choir a higher profile is palpable. As part of that drive, Dan is already planning that this year’s mini Easter festival – which also includes a Good Friday performance of Haydn’s Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross by the Doric String Quartet – will expand significantly next year.

“In 2014 Easter falls close to the start of the new term, so it’s a good opportunity to do something bigger. We will follow the Easter services, but I want to do some concerts around Holy Week as well. It’s an experience I had as a student in Cambridge, where there is a big Easter festival. There’s nothing comparable in Oxford, so I want to develop that. We’ve just got out of a hard winter, and there’s so much wonderful music for the season of Easter.”

WHERE AND WHEN

Easter at Magdalen • Doric String Quartet, 29 March, Magdalen College Chapel • St John Passion, 30 March, St John the Evangelist, Iffley Road • Tickets: www.magd.ox.ac.uk/tickets or on the door