Johann Sebastian Bach

These are first-class performers, very familiar with Bach’s work in award winning performances from the Edition Bachakademie. This 6 CD specially priced collection brings together the finest of Bach’s glorious cantatas of praise and thanksgiving such as “Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König” and Die Himmel erzählen die Ehre Gottes.

2010 re-package of the famous recording of Bach's Violin Concertos and the Concerto for Oboe Kennedy made together with the Berliner Philharmoniker

Most of us think of Kennedy as a rebel with a musical cause: a people's violinist, master of Elgar and Ellington, provocative in spirit but musically astute. In both Johann Sebastian Bach and Nigel Kennedy we have free-ranging spirits with huge appetites for their music .

Such is the beauty of Bach's music that Nigel claims he finds something new to explore, to understand everytime he raises his violin and performs Bach's work. Interestingly, he sees many comparisons between the best of jazz compositions and much of Bach's repertoire.

Bach loved the dances of the day: not only those of his native Germany, but also the varied forms that originated in England, France, Italy and Poland. Many of the movements in his instrumental works are in fact musically sophisticated dances and you can hear elements of that keen rhythmic sense throughout the four concertos recorded here.

Nigel Kennedy was the recipient of the "Outstanding Contribution to Classical Music" award from the UK 2000 Classical Brit Awards the same year he recorded this album.

To this day, Kennedy still declines to play by any one set of rules. Over the past decade or so, as well as recording Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Mlynarski and Karlowicz, he has laid his personal instrumental stamp on the songs of Jimi Hendrix, the Doors and Kate Bush; performed the violin intro to Baba O'Riley on stage with the Who; invited Jeff Beck onto the Prom stage with the NKQ; explored traditional klezmer music with the Polish band, Kroke, and dug deep into the roots of modern jazz on the Blue Note Sessions, an album he recorded in NYC in 2006 with legends Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette.

Now dividing his time between homes in London and Krakow, where he lives with his Polish-born wife of 10 years, Agnieszka, Kennedy has never felt more free to pursue his boundary-free musical objectives. "I'm enjoying my music much more than ever as I’m playing exactly what I want - it’s become a deeper experience and enjoyment for me, savouring the moment more, not thinking about the future or the past but thinking about now."

Recorded live in Genoa (Cattedrale di San Lorenzo) and London (Old Royal Naval College Chapel, Greenwich), November 2000.

Cantatas for the twentieth and twenty-first Sunday after Trinity, recorded live in November 2000. John Eliot Gardiner, The Monteverdi Choir and The English Baroque Soloists head to Italy to give two concerts, one in the cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa and one the following day in the basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome.

We join John Eliot and his forces for the first of these two concerts - a performance of three little-known secular–imaged cantatas in the stunning Gothic cathedral of San Lorenzo. The soloists are internationally acclaimed and include Magdalena Kožená, Sara Mingardo, Christoph Genz and Peter Harvey.

The concert opens with the solemn BWV 162 Ach! ich sehe, itzt, da ich zur Hochzeit gehe (Ah! I see, now, that I have gone to the feast), a cantata brought to life by Salomo Franck’s strongly worded libretto. Bach thrives upon Franck’s love of poetic compounds and polar opposites. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the opening bass aria where we get references to life and death, rays of heaven and fires of hell.

There then follows BWV 49 Ich geh und suche mit Verlangen (I go and seek with longing), a dialogue cantata geared towards creating an atmosphere depicting the beauty of the soul. In his booklet notes, Gardiner states that the best movement is the fourth which he believes to be “a kind of early version of Bernstein’s ‘I feel pretty.’ ”

We then travel back to London for a concert in the Old Royal Navel College Chapel, Greenwich, a perfect architectural and acoustic setting. Bach composed four outstanding works for this Sunday, marvellously contrasted and subtly differentiated by mood and instrumentation.

The earliest of these, BWV 109 Ich glaube, lieber Herr, hilf meinem Unglauben! (Lord, I believe, help Thou mie unbelief), opens the concert. The wonderful opening chorus, a setting of words from St Mark’s gospel, emphasises the tension between belief and scepticism in such personal terms that one wonders whether it mirrors Bach’s own private struggles of faith.

This theme of distress and the yearning for forgiveness continues in BWV 38 Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir (Out of deep distress I cry to you) where Bach, in the final chorus, emphasises this mood by giving all voices full orchestral doubling, including the rare usage of four trombones! After all that accumulated intensity, BWV 98 Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, dating from November 1726, is exceptionally genial.

“This ongoing recording project ranks as one of the musical events of the decade.” The Observer

This is Dynamic’s second release performed by the Italian pianist Andrea Bacchetti.

His first release for Dynamic, J.S. Bach’s Two-Part Inventions and Sinfonias (CDS629/1-2), received many positive reviews and was made CD of the Month in BBC Music Magazine. This series will be followed up by Bach’s Goldberg Variations in the Autumn.

Heinz Holliger, the Swiss composer and oboist has made a huge contribution to the rediscovery of little known and neglected works for the instrument. He has also been responsible for many new compositions for the oboe, and his repertoire ranges from the baroque as heard on these 3 CDs, through the classical era of Stamitz, Krommer, Hummel, Moscheles, Mozart, Bellini and Fiala to the avant-garde where he has worked closely with Pierre Boulez.

The oboe was developed from the medieval Shawn, which was a development of the Arabic instruments that would have been heard by crusaders in the Middle East during the 12th-14th centuries.

The earliest ‘modern’ oboes appeared in the 1660s, and it had by this time adopted a more flexible and softer sound making it possible to play together with violins. Its popularity spread from France where these innovations to the instrument took place, to Germany and importantly to centres of musical excellence in Italy – notably Venice where composers such as Lotti, Marcello and Albinoni worked. The Venetian musical scene inspired Bach – he adapted Vivaldi concertos for the keyboard, and Marcello’s concertos may well have provided the inspiration for his own concertos BWV1053/5/9.

Booklet essay.

Recordings made in 1981, 1982 and 1986.

‘I found plenty of things to enjoy in Holliger’s performances of these oboe concerto reconstructions. His sensibility to Bach’s melodic line together with a formidable technique to sustain it make for playing which is anything but routine – his account of the slow movement of the F major Concerto (BWV1053) is as lyrical as one could wish for’ (Bach) Gramophone, January 1986

‘I thoroughly enjoyed this LP, especially on account of Holliger’s mastery of his instrument and for the opportunity of hearing three unfamiliar concertos’ (Telemann) Gramophone, May 1983

“The ensemble is nigh perfect… the freshness with which they sing radiates joy throughout the entire score." Classic FM Magazine

"The Dunedin Consort's exemplary singers produce virtuoso choruses that are theatrically charged, splendidly poised and exquisitely blended.” Gramophone

The Dunedin Consort’s recording of Bach’s Mass in B Minor revisits the spectacular individual virtuosity that made the Messiah recording so successful. This is the premiere recording of the work in the new Breitkopf edition, edited by Joshua Rifkin, a leading thinker in authentic period performance, who fully endorses John Butt’s interpretation.

Bach’s Mass capitalizes on the very essence of the group’s skills: skilled virtuosic choral performance coupled with outstanding, characterful solo singing.

Bach’s Mass in B Minor is undoubtedly his most spectacular choral work and the Dunedin Consort’s single-voice performance enables a level of clarity and expression that is not traditionally a feature of modern choral performance.

This recording features several soloists from the acclaimed recording of Bach’s Matthew Passion, which was named the BBC Music Magazine’s Benchmark.

Please note that the whole text of the CD and of the enclosed booklet is ONLY IN ITALIAN LANGUAGE.

The Bach Players centre this programme on the chaconne: you will hear how Henry Purcell and J.S. Bach join hands in this much-loved dance form of the 17th and 18th centuries. Of the few works of Philipp Heinrich Erlebach that survive, they perform a suite that concludes with a chaconne. The two Bach cantatas are contrasting: BWV150 is said to be Bach’s earliest surviving cantata, BWV78 was composed in Leipzig at the height of his career. There’s something about the openness of sound, the sheer quality of music-making and the sense of connection between performers and composers that makes this a very special recording. Its contents explore the world of the Baroque chaconne, a secular dance form that became a staple of music for the concert room and chapel. The challenge of creating a piece above a repeated bass line certainly appealed to Bach, Purcell and the little-known Erlebach, each on inspired, inventive form in the works offered here. The Bach Players, a London-based collective formed in 1996, reach the music’s emotional heart with tremendous conviction.

“If the idea of composing above a repeated bass line sounds like a recipe for boredom, cast your ears towards Bach’s cantata no.78, ‘Jesu, der du meine Seele’ and its delicious duet for soprano and alto, which is vivaciously performed on this recording by Rachel Elliott and Clare Wilkinson. Purcell’s endlessly inventive genius and technical mastery merge beautifully in his Chacony to create an intoxicating musical mix. The Bach Players catch the work’s elegiac grandeur, slowly developing its expressive intensity with each repetition of the English composer’s eight-bar bass.” Classic FM , January 2010 *****