With this set of 12 cantatas, a few of them quite short, Dutch historical-instrument conductor Ton Koopman approaches the end of his monumental traversal of the complete Bach cantata corpus. The cantatas here mostly date from the last two decades of Bach's life. By this time Bach had cantatas from earlier cycles ready for most occasions pertaining ...
Since Ton Koopman began recording Bach's complete cantatas in 1994, he has gone through three labels in getting his recordings to the public. First it was Erato, then it was Teldec, and now, finally, Antonie Marchand, the company that has not only completed Koopman's work but reissued the earlier volumes. All this is a wonderful example of ...
The 22nd and final volume in Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir's series of recordings of Bach's cantatas includes two of his final Lutheran cantatas, all four of his short Catholic masses based on movements taken from earlier cantatas, and an early secular version of one of the sacred cantatas plus arrangements of two ...
With this Dutchman on DHM, Bruno Weil attempts to refresh Wagner's classic by returning it to its original form. He deploys a scaled-down orchestra of period instruments (including both natural and valved brass, and an ophicleide in place of the modern tuba) and uses the original Paris version of the score, which predates even Wagner's own ...
Just how to arrange Johann Sebastian Bach's cantatas for purposes of recording is always a daunting question -- to organize a complete cantata project by BWV number works the least well of all possible options. If J.S. Bach: Cantatas, Vol. 17, gives any indication of what Ton Koopman has in mind, it appears to be historical context rather than ...
Ton Koopman has recorded Bach's St. Matthew Passion twice, and in many ways, he seems to have changed his mind about the work. His 1992 recording for Erato was, for an original instrument/historically informed performance, large in scale, broad in scope, dramatic in execution, and heavy in sound. This, his 2005 recording for Antonie Marchand, is ...
During the trend of composers writing operas about composers (witness, for example, Alfred Schnittke's 1994 Gesualdo, Franz Hummel's 1996 Gesualdo, and Bo Holten's 2004 Gesualdo) it was not, in fact, an entirely new phenomenon. Pfitzner's 1915 Palestrina is the earliest composer-opera to have come anywhere close to entering the repertoire, but ...
You might not expect the figure of Mary to have called forth exceptional music from the Protestant Bach, but the Marian feast days survived the Lutheran paring of the Catholic calendar, and at least the first two of these three cantatas are imposing works. Best of all is the opening chorale of the Cantata No. 1, "Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern ...
One of the best things about recording all of Bach's cantatas is the nearly infinite number of discs that can be drawn from them. For example, now that Ton Koopman has completed his series of recordings of the extant cantatas, his performances can be re-grouped in various ways. This disc takes four Ascension Day cantatas recorded by Koopman with ...
Why did Bach, a German Lutheran composer, write Latin church music? The churches for which he wrote music used Latin settings on certain major holidays and feast days. But there was another reason: Bach was a practical man, and music suited to the needs of the Catholic court of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden could (and in several cases did) do ...
George Frederick Handel's first oratorio is perhaps most familiar in its English version, The Triumph of Time and Truth, but that is a later reworking of the original in Italian, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (1707), the version that appears on this marvelous 2008 Hyperion release. This complex work presents an interweaving of lyricism, ...
Here's a recording that, to use the terminology of African-American vernacular music, is old school in every way. It begins with a decidedly odd sound, which has a hollow, boxy quality, with distortion at the frequency extremes, that could almost have been heard on a 1950s LP. The booklet indicates that the disc was recorded by Swiss Radio, but it ...
Legendary Dutch historical-performance conductor and keyboardist Ton Koopman, in his youth a radical but now (in these days of one-voice-per-part revisionism) something of a conservative, has issued a variety of Bach cantata recordings on his own Antoine Marchand label (that's French for Ton Koopman). They come from various places and times, but ...
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