Robin Blaze

This landmark series is nearly at its end in this antepenultimate recording. The three cantatas on this recording come from the first half of the 1730s and clearly show Bach’s affinity for instrumental colour and expressive melodies rich in syncopation and suspensions.

All three works are choral cantatas based on well-known hymns and are therefore more choral in style.

In Volume 52 of his monumental sacred cantatas project, Masaaki Suzuki includes one of J.S. Bach’s best-loved cantatas of all, Wachet auf ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140.

The famous chorale is joined by a couple of the most beautiful love duets in the history of music, here sung by the soprano Hana Blažíková and bass Peter Kooij.

Der Herr ist mein getreuer Hirt (‘the Lord is my faithful shepherd’) follows. Psalm 23 provides the text for all five movements.

Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir was composed for a church service celebrating the inauguration of a new city council – a ‘Ratswahl cantata’ – in which Bach shows off his capabilities as a composer. The first chorus is a reworking of material which Bach would return to in his Mass in B minor.

This startling recording project now nears its conclusion with three final volumes left to be released.

The Dunedin Consort’s highly anticipated new recording of ‘Esther - First Reconstructable Version (Cannons), 1720’ is the third recording in its hugely successful Handel series.

The Consort have set the bar high for this Handel performance with a Gramophone Award in 2007 for ‘Messiah’ and a BBC Radio 3 ‘Building a Library’ First Choice accolade for ‘Acis and Galatea’.

For Esther, director John Butt has reunited his award-winning team of soloists (Susan Hamilton - Esther; Nicholas Mulroy - Mordecai; Matthew Brook - Haman; Thomas Hobbs - 1st Israelite) plus well-known guest soloists Robin Blaze – Priest, James Gilchrist – Habdonah / Assuerus and Electra Lochhead - Israelite Boy.

The Dunedin Consort has established a reputation as the finest single-part period performance choir currently performing.

In 2011 Gramophone named the Dunedin Consort the 11th Greatest Choir in recognition of its ‘triple focus upon artistic revitalisation of over-familiar great works, meticulous musicological enquiry and the audiophile integrity of Linn Records' production values.’

The multi-award-winning Dunedin Consort has won praise for the natural style of its soloists (‘an authoritative bass and a superb contralto’ The Guardian) and renown for the virtuosity of its singers.

The Dunedin Consort has performed at music festivals in Scotland - including the Edinburgh International Festival and broadcasts frequently on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Scotland.

On the 50th volume of Masaaki Suzuki’s traversal of J.S. Bach’s cantatas features works composed by Bach in collaboration with the Leipzig poet Picander (Christian Friedrich Henrici).

Three of the works on the disc, along with six others, are all that remain of his cantatas written in 1729.

The cantatas here featured generally make sparing use of the choir, but centre on two arias, linked by one or two recitatives, and a final chorale. In addition, the surviving works contain several examples of parody and reuse of earlier instrumental movements as introductions: The opening Sinfonia of BWV 174, uses the first movement of his Third Brandenburg Concerto.

The volume features soprano Hana Blažíková, alongside three other familiar soloists of the series: Robin Blaze (counter-tenor), Gerd Türk (tenor) and Peter Kooij (bass).

Recent releases from the series have received critical acclaim: in International Record Review, where Volume 48 was described as demonstrating ‘the ever-rising standard, by now quite stratospheric, of Suzuki and his choir and orchestra in this massive recording project.’

Czech-born Jan Dismas Zelenka was by all accounts one of Baroque music’s trickier customers—fervently religious but completely lacking in courtly graces. Combine this with a tendency to throw out the rulebook when it came to harmonic convention and it’s hardly surprising that he was underappreciated in his lifetime. Yet here is some of the most pungently exciting writing of the Baroque, as individual as that of his near-contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach. The very opening of Zelenka’s Litaniae sets out his stall and Robert King and his eponymous Consort make the most of its startling qualities. But he is a composer to tug at the heartstrings too, nowhere more so than in the Salve regina, ravishingly sung by a young Carolyn Sampson.

Johann Kuhnau was one of life’s polymaths—as well as being a composer he trained as a lawyer, spoke several languages, helped found Leipzig’s opera house, theorized about music and even found time to write a novel sending up the shortcomings of the contemporary music scene. Musically he’s the link between Schütz and Bach, but he was alive to many different stylistic traits as this selection of sacred music demonstrates. From the brilliantly brassy opening of Ihr Himmel jubilirt to the restrained intensity of Tristis est anima mea, it’s music invigorated at every turn by The King’s Consort.

After 15 years since Masaaki Suzuki and Bach Collegium Japan began recording all of Bach’s church cantatas, this huge project enters the final stretch with its 49th volume.

In the present volume Suzuki has gathered four works from 1728-29, with the texts all written by the poet Christian Friedrich Henrici – a regular collaborator with Bach, most famously on the St Matthew Passion and the Christmas Oratorio

The four works gathered here hint at the variety that may have characterized the Bach-Picander cantata year, with moods spanning from the jubilation of the New Year Cantata BWV171 to the anticipation of Jesus’ path of suffering in Sehet, wir gehn hinauf gen Jerusalem, BWV159, intended for the Sunday before Passiontide. There is also variety on a more technical level, with BWV188 and BWV156 both beginning with instrumental sinfonias featuring important solo parts for organ and oboe respectively.

The latest volumes from the cantatas series have been met with considerable critical acclaim. With Volume 46 being made a ‘Critics’ Choice’ in Gramophone, and BBC Music Magazine singling out both Volume 47 and 48 as ‘Choral & Song Choice of the Month’.

Continuing the series ‘Bach’s Contemporaries’, this volume concentrates on the wonderful music of Johann Schelle—a cousin of Kuhnau (another composer featured in this series).

This immensely striking sacred music by Schelle (one of Bach’s predecessors in the post of Kantor in Leipzig’s famous Thomas Church) brings together a top-flight group of soloists and a large and colourful assembly of instrumentalists, and presents remarkable and splendidly varied music which not only stands up proudly in its own musical right, but also greatly enhances our understanding of Bach’s own sacred writing.

Sebastian Knüpfer is yet another Baroque composer whose reputation and popularity have been overshadowed by J S Bach. Little of Knüpfer’s music has previously been transcribed from its many manuscripts, let alone published. However, in his day Knüpfer was a respected and highly soughtafter composer; his compositions were admired by his contemporaries and, according to his obituary, he ‘composed quotations of the Psalms and other Biblical books with such sweetness and skilfulness that he delighted even the saddest hearts, and his name is spoken with admiration not only in Leipzig but also outside’.

As we have come to expect from Robert King and his King’s Consort, the performances are of the highest standard with some of the finest singers on the early music platform today.

‘With Suzuki you can hear Bach's heart beat...’ (International Record Review

Volume 48 of Masaaki Suzuki’s and Bach Collegium Japan’s traversal of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas opens with Cantata 34, O ewiges Feuer, o Ursprung der Liebe – a jubilant work intended for Whit Sunday 1727, but with its origins in an earlier, secular wedding cantata.

Gott, man lobet dich in der Stille (BWV 120) was composed for a festive church service marking the annual town council election in Leipzig. But the programme also also offers moments of introspection and quiet beauty, such as the celebrated alto aria Ich will dich all mein Leben lang from Cantata 117, here performed by the counter-tenor Robin Blaze, well-known to the followers of this series.

Cantata 98 contains another heartfelt aria: Hört, ihr Augen, auf zu weinen, sung by the soprano Hana Blažíková, whose performances on recent releases have impressed many reviewers.

With approximately another eight volumes remaining of this great undertaking, the energy and dedication of Masaaki Suzuki and his musicians show no signs of flagging, and the recent volumes 46 and 47 were warmly welcomed by reviewers around the world, receiving distinctions such as ‘Critics’ Choice’ in Gramophone and ‘Choral Choice of the Month’ in BBC Music Magazine.