Whips, scourges, sinews, blood and pus: where Bach’s two Passions lament from a contemplative distance, Handel’s plunges right to the bone, to the cruel, tortured death that is the heart of the Easter story. Perhaps that explains the work’s recent neglect. But with this performance from the Academy of Ancient Music, as well as a brand-new performing edition by Leo Duarte, maybe the tide is finally turning.

Premiered 300 years ago, the Brockes-Passion – a setting of poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes’s popular Passion oratorio,...