Bach, J C: Lamento 'Ach daß ich Wassers gnug hätte'

The Art of Magdalena Kožená is an anthology of her finest performances, documenting both the range of her voice and the breadth of repertoire to which she can bring authority, from early baroque of Monteverdi and Strozzi to sacred arias by Bach, opera arias by Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart, Gounod, Bizet and Auber, as well as orchestral songs by Mahler. To all she brings an absorbing emotional depth and maturity of her interpretative abilities.

Unique to Kožená are the songs rooted in Bohemia and Moravia by Dvořak and Janáček. She still feels closely connected to her Czech roots. “It’s music that stays in your body forever”.

This is Magdalena’s own selection of her favourite songs and arias, sung in French, Italian and German as well as in her mother tongue.

28-page Booklet, including new liner notes from Nick Kimberley.

With voluptuous pleasure, sensuality, tender human expression, Bach shows his passion for the human voice. Gérard Lesne, one of the first to reveal the beauties of the countertenor voice, continues to delight us with his performances.

German baroque cantatas performed by Geneva-based early music ensemble Gli Angeli Genève under the baton of Stephan MacLeod. Gli Angeli Genève specialises in 17th and 18th century chamber music. The Bruhns and Telemann cantatas are rarely heard or recorded.

Booklet includes full texts which are also available in PDF format by inserting the CD into a PC or Mac

The pieces on this recording demonstrate the consummate art with which the German composers reconciled the new ideas imported from Italy at the very beginning of the 17th century (the principle of the basso continuo, accompanied monody, the concertato technique) with local traditions, thereby giving birth to works of a subtle beauty and an almost inexhaustible richness. This stylistic revolution paved the way to the flourishing of great forms like the vocal solo, the spiritual concert, the cantata, etc. cultivated by composers as different as Schütz, Buxtehude, Tunder and Erlebach: in the very heart of Baroque Europe the Germans were taking their place.

German baroque masterworks for countertenor and strings Buxtehude’s fame rests principally on his keyboard music but this disc explores his outstanding vocal works, set in the context of J.S. and J.C. Bach. Each of these composers worked in important centres of Lutheran music in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Germany. Seventeenth-century German composers quickly adopted the new vocal styles that burst onto the scene in Italy at the beginning of the century: monody, in which a single voice declaims a text with special attention to the emotion and meaning of the words, and in the concerto style, consisting of opposing bodies of sound.

The members of this ensemble are all leading specialists in historical performance practice and are internationally acclaimed performers of baroque music. They aim to make a difference and create something at the cutting edge. Il Gardellino has been enjoying an ever increasing success on their tours.

First released in the spring of 2002, Lamento was awarded Quebec’s Opus Prize for Record of the Year in the Baroque Music category. Hear the acclaimed countertenor Daniel Taylor and his ensemble Theatre of Early Music in this telling combination of sacred German vocal solos and fine instrumental works.