Johann Sebastian Bach

800 years of St Thomas’s Boys Choir: to celebrate this significant anniversary. Rondeau Production releases a limited special edition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion – and at a discounted price.

Over 280 years after its first performance, Bach’s St Matthew Passion still exerts an unbroken fascination. The present recording was produced at the work’s historical home, and documents a long standing performance tradition the Thomanerchor Leipzig (St Thomas’s Boys Choir and the Gewandhausorchester MGewandhaus Orchestra) regularly perform one of Bach’s magnificent passion settings at St Thomas Leipzig on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday With this recording. The early version of the famous St Matthew Passion is now available on CD for the first time. The astounding soloists, the Thomanerchor Leipzig St Thomas’s Boys Choir) with its superior, unmistakable sound, and the Gewandhausorchester (Gewandhaus Orchestra) and its exquisite instrumental soloists present the sufferings and death of Jesus of Nazareth in a performance of seldom heard dramatic impetus. This production under the direction of the present cantor at St Thomas, Georg Christoph Biller, combines a profoundly religious message with exceptional musical mastery.

The liturgical year with Johann Sebastian Bach: in celebration of the 800th anniversary of Thomanerchor Leipzig (St Thomas’s Boys Choir), Rondeau Production is publishing a ten-part CD series which presents a selection of cantatas for the liturgical year. In Leipzig, music for the liturgical year has an especially well kept tradition: up to the present day Thomanerchor Leipzig (St Thomas’s Boys Choir) and the Gewandhausorchester (Gewandhaus Orchestra) join forces each week in the performance of one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas at the church of St Thomas.

Like the recently released CD containing cantatas for Advent, the disc for the feast of Epiphany presents works for the beginning of the liturgical year: the Epiphany is the first ecclesiastic feast day of the new calendar year. Celebrated on 6 January, it follows on seamlessly from the Christmas celebrations and those for the turn of the year. Translated from Greek, epiphany originally means ‘appearance of the Lord.’ The recorded cantatas “Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen” (BWV 65), “Ach Gott, wie manches Herzeleid” (BWV 3), and “Alles nur nach Gottes Willen” (BWV 72) emphatically relate the biblical message to the reality of mankind in the present. This makes Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas, first and foremost, musical sermons. The cantatas were written for the feast day of Epiphany itself, and for the following Sundays.

The current cantor at St Thomas, Georg Christoph Biller, is fortunate to have boys from the choir’s own ranks performing the soprano and alto solos; a hallmark of the new recording’s unique level of artistry.

The liturgical year with Johann Sebastian Bach: in celebration of the 800th anniversary of Thomanerchor Leipzig (St Thomas’s Boys Choir Leipzig), Rondeau Production is publishing a ten-part CD series which presents a selection of cantatas for the liturgical year. In Leipzig, music for the liturgical year has an especially well kept tradition: up to the present day Thomanerchor Leipzig (St Thomas’s Boys Choir) and the Gewandhausorchester (Gewandhaus Orchestra) join forces each week in the performance of one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantatas at the church of St Thomas.

Following the publication of discs with cantatas for the Reformation, Christmas, and Pentecost, the newest release is the fourth recording of the ten-disc series: it presents the cantatas Schwingt freudig euch empor BWV 36 and Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland BWV 61 and 62 which Johann Sebastian Bach composed for performances on the First Sunday of Advent. As cantor at St Thomas Leipzig he followed the town’s adherence to the practice of tempus clausum, the period of silence: no polyphonic music was performed in services between the Second and Fourth Sundays of Advent.

The current cantor at St Thomas, Georg Christoph Biller, is fortunate to have boys from the choir’s own ranks performing the soprano and alto solos; a hallmark of the new recording’s unique level of artistry.

In 1802, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Bach's first biographer, related the legend of the origin of the Goldberg Variations, thus contributing considerably to the work's fame. They were allegedly the object of a commission from Count Kayserling, former ambassador of Russia to the court of the Elector of Saxony. The Count, suffering from insomnia, had a former student of Bach's in his service, the young Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who played the harpsichord to divert him during his sleepless nights. He never wearied of hearing 'his' variations that, according to the story, were composed in exchange for a golden goblet filled with gold coins. Forkel's account is pure fiction. Contrary to custom, Bach left no dedication on the frontispiece of the edition. In addition, it is unlikely that Goldberg, aged 14 at the time, could have performed such a difficult work! Finally, although the coins could have been spent, there is no trace to be found of the golden goblet in the inventory of the composer's belongings drawn up after his death. However, the Goldberg Variations bear witness to the Cantor of Leipzig's genius, then at its peak, combining peerless performing feats and the unequalled art of a refined, scholarly composition.

These variations for harpsichord occupy an exceptional place in Bach's catalogue, constituting, in a sense, the fourth part of the Clavier Übung and opening the way for the great speculative works: the Musical Offering, Canonic Variations and Art of Fugue. In his important study devoted to Bach, musicologist Alberto Basso places this composition of 1741 midway between musical practice and theoretical music, describing it as Ars Artificialis. This aria and its thirty variations put the finishing touches to Bach's experimenting at the keyboard, exploiting the variation form to the exhaustion of the theme.

IRENE SCHARRER, though perhaps the least remembered of the major Matthay pupils, was the earliest to record, beginning in 1909 at the age of 21.That in itself is a credit to her early fame, which she established through an extrovert, but always musical, virtuosity.

She excelled in such works as the Chopin Etudes, nine of which she recorded, and in other brilliant pieces such as those here by Scarlatti and Liszt, but the poise and refinement of her Chopin nocture or the slow movement of the Mozart sonata reveal another side to her playing that is sadly underrepresented on disc. Her final recording, of the Litolff Scherzo, was also her most famous; in its day it was a best seller and was responsible for putting that work on the musical map. This set reissues for the first time all Scharrer’s electrical recordings and also an example of every work she recorded in the acoustic era (pre 1925) that was not later remade as an electrical recording. For completeness, a discography of all her other acoustic recordings is also included.

Bach’s glorious Orchestral Suites are performed by the extremely talented Reykjavik Chamber Orchestra under the artistic direction of Reinhard Goebel, a name so strongly connected to the Deutsche Grammophon label for so many years.