Johann Sebastian Bach

The young French guitarist Gabriel Bianco adds First Prize in the 2008 GFA International Solo Competition to an impressive list of previous awards from international competitions.

He started playing guitar at the age of five, and graduated at the age of twenty with first prize from the Conservatoire National de Région de Paris. The same year, he received the highest mark and ranking in the entrance competition to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris.

Gabriel Bianco gave his first concert in Paris when he was fifteen, and is now invited to play throughout the world. His teachers have included Ramon de Herrera, Oliver Chassain and Judicaël Perroy.

Features the Bell Telephone Hour Orchestra / Donal Voorhees

Live Performances

Michael Rabin was an American virtuoso violinist of Romanian descent. During a concert in Carnegie Hall, he momentarily lost his balance and fell forward, marking the beginning of a neurological condition which badly hindered his career. He died at just 35 after sustaining a head injury in a fall at his apartment in New York. This collection, recorded between 1950 and 1968, features works performed on many different occasions, including the Ravinia Festival.

Legendary Treasures

Total time: 240 min 53 sec

ADD Mono

Recordings taken from a series of concerts given in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in 1962.

Bach’s cello suites played on the instrument for which they were conceived: the shoulder cello (violoncello da spalla). This recording casts a completely new light on these pieces and their origin.

“Quartet New Generation have no qualms about being a self-consciously fresh concept in chamber music….. The result compellingly fuses the novelties of digitally created sonic art with the inimitable excitement of a real-time acoustic performance. The Irish Times

In 1733 J S Bach began work on the composition of a Missa, a portion of the liturgy sung in Latin and common to both the Lutheran and Roman Catholic rites, and it was first performed that same yaer during the festival of the Oath of Allegiance to Augustus III. It consisted of settings of the Kyrie and Gloria that now comprise the first part of the Mass in B Minor. The Credo was probably written between 1742 and 1745, but may have predated the Missa. The remaining parts (Sanctus, Osanna, Benedictus and Agnus Dei et Dona nobis pacem) were all added in the late 1740s. The Mass in B Minor did not assume its final form until Bach's last years. It may be that Bach wished it to be regarded as a monument to his skill, for it is a work based much upon his earlier music, adapted and refined to meet a sacred purpose.

The highly rated early music group La Petite Bande was founded in Belgium in 1972 by Sigiswald Kuijken at the request of the record company Deutsche Harmonia Mundi in order to record Lully's "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" with the conductor Gustav Leonhardt. Having initially concentrated mainly on French music, the orchestra's repertoire has expanded over the years to include music by the Italian masters and that of Bach, Händel, Gluck, Haydn and Mozart. This present recording of The Bach B Minor Mass uses a version where the text is sung by single voices, and a small scale choir. The recording is being made available as a double SACD hybrid set.

These recordings have been selected from the award-winning cycle of recordings of the complete cantatas of J. S. Bach by Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir. The featured soloists are sopranos Caroline Stam, Ruth Ziesak, and Sandrine Piau, altos Elisabeth von Magnus, Michael Chance, and Bogna Bartosz, tenors Paul Agnew and James Gilchrist, and bass Klauss Mertens.

Six of the works that Bach wrote for the annual church service celebrating the inauguration of the newly elected town council have survived: the Mühlhausen cantata “Gott ist mein König” BWV 71 of 1708 and several Leipzig cantatas: “Preise, Jerusalem, den Herrn” BWV 119, “Ihr Tore zu Zion” BWV 193 (incomplete), “Gott, man lobet dich in der Stille” BWV 120, “Wir danken dir, Gott” BWV 29, and “Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele” BWV 69. The present album contains three representative town council election cantatas from Bach’s Leipzig years, BWVs 119,120, and 69, and includes the first and last works prepared for this occasion. The last town council election cantata performed by Bach in 1749 was actually a repeat performance of cantata BWV 29, an older work originating from 1731.

The Musical Offering, BWV1079 is the only instrumental work by Bach for which we have a detailed knowledge of its origins. It owes its creation to Bach’s visit to the royal court at Potsdam which lasted two days between 7 and 8 May 1747, a landmark event in the composer’s biography. German newspapers reported the memorable encounter between King Frederick II of Prussia and the “famous Capellmeister Bach in Leipzig” just a few days later. They describe the occasion and mention that Bach found the theme given to him by the king for improvisation on the clavier to be “the epitome of excellence”, and hence wished to “put it on paper in a proper fugue, and afterwards have it engraved in copper.”

The fact that Bach specifies the instrumentation in only a few of the movements has led to a profusion of “realizations” of the work (for example, Webern’s orchestration of the six-part ricercar), most of which have little to do with the actual practice of chamber music in the 1740’s, which was restricted to quite a small number of instruments—usually violins (or instruments which could imitate the violin, such as the flute) in the treble, harpsichord and either gamba or cello on the continuo.

Ton Koopman studied harpsichord with the legendary Gustav Leonhardt, and has over a distinguished career of 40 years become one of the worlds leading experts in the field of baroque music performance.

In recent years he has directed the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra in a series of critically acclaimed recordings of the complete cantatas of J. S. Bach, volume 22 of which was the recipient of a BBC Music Magazine award in 2007. In 2006 Ton Koopman was awarded the Bach Medal by the city of Leipzig in recognition of his major contribution to Bach performance and scholarship.

In Lutheran Germany of Bach’s time the Whitsun or Pentecost festival was celebrated like other high ecclesiastical feasts on three consecutive days, Sunday through to Tuesday. Music was performed in the services on all three feast days and Bach usually wrote cantatas for each of them. There were nine of these Whitsun cantatas altogether, and this collection presents a representative cross-section: BWV 172 for the Sunday and then BWV 68 and BWV 174, respectively, for the Second Day of Pentecost, and BWV 175 for the Third Day. As is typical for works to be performed on the high feasts, they invariably display a rich instrumental configuration: BWV 172 includes trumpets and timpani; BWV 68 makes use of 3 oboes, violoncello piccolo, and supporting cornetto and trombones; and BWV 174 features 2 horns, 3 oboes, along with an unusual complement of nine concertato strings.

These recordings have been selected from the award-winning cycle of recordings of the complete cantatas of J. S. Bach by Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir. The featured soloists are sopranos Barbara Schlick and Deborah York, altos Kai Wessel and Bogna Bartosz, tenor Christoph Pregardien, and bass Klauss Mertens