Classical Music

Busoni's transcriptions of Bach have long been one of the mainstays of the piano repertoire. Bach himself worshipped the music of the Danish-born Diderich Buxtehude (1637-1707), famously walking 250 miles to L�beck to hear him play. The Liszt student August Stradal (1860-1930) obviously shared that admiration, transcribing ten of Buxtehude's most imposing organ works for piano, thus creating alongside 'Bach-Busoni' a corpus of grandiose - and virtuoso - Baroque music for the modern concert grand that has somehow remained almost entirely unknown. Meilin Ai studied for her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in piano performance with Joseph Banowetz at the University of North Texas and is now a full-time faculty member of the Conservatory of Music of the Sichuan Normal University in China.

After the success of the Red, Yellow, Blue and Pink collections (a total of 56 reissues), which brought the pearls from the Baroque catalogues of the house labels back into the spotlight, here are fourteen new titles offering a chance to rediscover more Baroque treasures and rarities. Like the last series, this fifth installment also opens up to the Classical (Mozart) or Renaissance (Dufay) repertories – recordings that are an integral part of Alpha’s identity and history. This series’ reissues are performed by the finest musicians in the field; most of these recordings received one or more awards on their first release. The albums come with proper booklets, including notes in three languages (French, English, German). Photographers from many different backgrounds illustrate the covers of the series with their works: this time the main theme is the color white. The present album features Dietrich Buxtehude’s Ciaccona: Il Monde Che Gira performed by Maria Cristina Kiehr, Victor Torres, and Stylus Phantasticus.

The Abendmusiken were a legendary concert series organized by Buxtehude in Lübeck. Even Johann Sebastian Bach travelled a long way to attend these concerts of sacred and instrumental music and met the master Dietrich Buxtehude, the most famous organist in Europe. To mark the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, Vox Luminis and the Ensemble Masques have come together to perform a programme of cantatas (Gott hilf mir, denn das Wasser geht mir bis an die Seele, BuxWV 34 | Befiehl dem Engel, dass er komm, BuxWV 10 | Jesu, meine Freude, BuxWV 60 | Herzlich lieb hab ich dich, o Herr, BuxWV 41) and instrumental pieces (Sonatas BuxWV 255 and 261). The recording assembles leading specialists of this repertory, with the expert voices of Vox Luminis combining with the vitality of the instrumentalists of Ensemble Masques.

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REVIEWS:

They mix cantatas and trio sonatas with a judicious flair. Nothing is over-stated or under-nurtured; and Meunier always finds a deeply human dimension to Buxtehude’s piety that taps into the bürgerlich bonhomie of the sonatas. Rich, lively, and truthful, the recorded sound consummates a seductively considered disc that pretty much never puts a foot wrong. Hanseatic heaven!

– BBC Music Magazine

This is music of expressive variety and flexibility, ideally suited to the skills of Vox Luminis, whose name on a release these days is enough in itself to spark a tingle of anticipation. They do not disappoint, charting the emotional contours of Buxtehude’s music with exquisite understanding and demonstrating their now familiar deep but lucid choral blend, out of which expertly executed solos emerge and return.

– Gramophone

Buxtehude: Complete Organ Works, Vol. 3

Buxtehude: Complete Organ Works, Vol. 1

Classical Music

Classical Music

As the composer that Johann Sebastian Bach at the age of twenty walked more than 400 kilometres in order to meet, Dietrich Buxtehude holds a place of honour in the history of music. Luckily, an important portion of his music, mainly vocal works and organ pieces, has also survived. Having spent his childhood and early years in Helsingborg and Elsinore, on either side of the strait that divides Denmark and Sweden, Buxtehude was recruited as organist by the congregation of the great Marienkirche in the wealthy Hanseatic city of Lübeck. On the basis of this, as well as the challenges posed by his organ compositions, it is safe to assume that he was a virtuoso on his instrument. He would also have been a connoisseur of fine organs - the finest of which at the time were to be found in Northern Germany. Two such magnificent instruments still exist in the small towns of Altenbruch and Lüdingworth, some 130 kilometres west of Lübeck, and on them Masaaki Suzuki here performs a varied selection of Buxtehude's organ works. This ranges from brief chorale preludes to the magnificent Te Deum laudamus and the celebrated Ciaccona in E minor. Although he is most widely known for his on-going, highly praised series of Bach's cantatas on BIS, Masaaki Suzuki in fact began his professional career as a church organist at the age of twelve, later studying the instrument both in Tokyo and in Amsterdam. For BIS he has previously recorded Bach's Organ Mass ('an organist of distinguished musicianship and superior technique' wrote the American Record Guide) and organ works by Sweelinck, a disc which upon its release was recommended by Gramophone and described in International Record Review as containing 'performances which are compelling in their stylistic integrity and uncompromising musicianship.'

A seminal figure in the development of North German organ music, Buxtehude spent the greater part of his long career in Lubeck, where he was visited by the young Handel and Bach, eager to hear his legendary performances.

BUXTEHUDE: Organ Music, Vol. 4

BUXTEHUDE: Organ Music, Vol. 3

Classical Music

Buxtehude’s Opus 1 sits at a stylistic and formal crossroads, interweaving some of the most refined counterpoint of the 17th century with a sense of boundlessness in time and texture, creating a music in which order and fantasy coexist in perfectly imperfect balance. Composing at the dawn of the 18th century, Buxtehude demonstrates a fidelity to the caprices of earlier 17th-century works while also taking up the challenges of the more extended and developed ensemble writing then emerging in the works of Corelli and his 18th-century successors. Filament comprises a core trio of violin, viola da gamba, and keyboards. Filament's mission is to be the bright connective thread — that eponymous filament — linking the world of its audience with that of its repertoire.

Classical Music