After a life dedicated to music, especially of his hometown Dresden and Saxony, world-renown trumpeter Ludwig Güttler concludes his career around his 80th birthday in 2023. It is hard to overestimate his musical, political and social role in Dresden, but also the impact he had on musical research of the Saxonian court, the development of the Corno da Caccia and any other field he touched in his comprehensive life. This edition is devoted to the headline, the motto he found, that constitutes his firm belief: In all that I do, I am guided by the Lord's counsel. he who can accomplish all and owns all, in all things He must, if they are to succeed, give me advice and counsel. The album features not only a meaningful selection of his extensive catalogue but also 5 completely new recordings from the world-famous Dresden Frauenkirche, in which rebuilding he partook such a vital role. It is therefore logical that the DVD features - for the first time on a physical medium - the festive Gala Concert for the Inauguration of this very house of God, where he leads his own Virtuosi Saxoniae and the Vocal Ensemble Saxony in Hasse's "Ultima" Mass.

The large-scale Bach Organ Landscapes project featuring J.S. Bach’s entire organ oeuvre recorded on a range of instruments aims to provide an overview of organ-playing and organ-building traditions that were key to Bach’s composing. With a keen eye to the unique cultural organ legacy of the places associated with Bach, Halubek has placed Bach’s original sound at the heart of his project. The recordings are accompanied by digital material that offer an almost tactile access to the great composer’s sound universe. This Album features the legendary Silbermann organ in Freiberg near Dresden.

The large-scale Bach Organ Landscapes project featuring J.S. Bach’s entire organ oeuvre recorded on a range of instruments aims to provide an overview of organ-playing and organ-building traditions that were key to Bach’s composing. With a keen eye to the unique cultural organ legacy of the places associated with Bach, Halubek has placed Bach’s original sound at the heart of his project. The recordings are accompanied by digital material that offer an almost tactile access to the great composer’s sound universe. This Album features the legendary Silbermann organ in Freiberg near Dresden.

The six Sonatas, which are often described as ‘Trio Sonatas for Organ,’ hold a unique place in Bach’s oeuvre. In a sense, ‘trio’ is the most natural organ texture: right hand, left hand, and feet each takes one line of counterpoint. However, in the six Sonatas, the contrapuntal lines are granted a degree of independence that is unmatched in Bach’s surviving organ music. Thus, they are atypical of Bach’s output for the instrument, and indeed of organ music in general. The Sonatas are, in effect, ‘ensemble music for one player’ – indeed, several movements originated as actual ensemble pieces. To Bach’s contemporaries, this transplanting of the secular, instrumental trio sonata genre onto the organ would have seemed rather daring. After all, the organ was, first and foremost, a liturgical instrument, with its own venerable repertoire tradition.

With a catalogue of acclaimed albums for Brilliant Classics stretching well into double figures, the Dutch recorder virtuoso Erik Bosgraaf goes back to Bach for his latest release, with an album of arrangements as imaginatively conceived and as stylishly executed as Volume 1 (94296), released in 2011, which won glowing reviews from the international music press. Bach wrote as inventively and idiomatically for the recorder throughout his career as he did for every other instrument at his disposal, but he left no concertos in which the instrument takes the spotlight.

Thus Bosgraaf and his colleagues have attempted to answer the question, what might Bach have done, or could he have done, if he had written concertos for the recorder? They have looked for inspiration to the cantatas, and not only those where Bach composed memorable recorder parts such as the Actus Tragicus. For example, the album’s opening G major concerto is compiled from a tenor aria of dazzling runs in BWV74, followed by the sorrowful opening Sinfonia of BWV12 (in which the oboe originally takes the starring role), and then another tenor aria from BWV81 which graphically illustrates the foaming waves of a stormy sea. In both aria transcriptions, Bosgraaf’s recorder takes over the vocal line, and paints vivid sound pictures with his remarkable palette of tone colors. A second concerto in D major draws its music from similar sources, followed by a Partita which the Dutch musicologist has arranged from movements of the Fifth French Suite. A further concerto is supplied by a relatively ‘straight’ transcription of the familiar (but sublime) A minor Concerto for violin, BWV1041.

Over a career spanning more than 30 years, the Dutch harpsichordist and conductor Pieter-Jan Belder has become renowned as a Bach interpreter with his surveys in concert and on record of the keyboard and orchestral masterpieces such as The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos and no fewer than three recordings of the Goldberg Variations. On this new album, recorded in 2020 and 2021 on a modern Titus Crijnen copy of a Ruckers model, Pieter-Jan Belder turns to the overlooked corners of Bach’s early writing for the harpsichord. These include standalone fugues, fantasias and suites based on themes by contemporary composers such as Reincken and Albinoni. Nevertheless, there is no sense of routine or technical exercise about them. The pieces here are almost all extrovert, playing to the strengths of the young Bach as a performer as well as composer, and already demonstrating that confidence which would go on to mark his mature compositions.

An appreciation of French flair is discernible in the F minor Suite BWV823 and elsewhere, but the dominant influence is the keyboard writing of Girolamo Frescobaldi, whose toccatas and canzonas were studied by Bach from an early age. The better-known pieces here include the sober and songful Aria variata BWV989 with its courtly French theme, and the E flat Prelude, Fugue and Allegro originally written for lute, but which also finds a happy home on the harpsichord. The most famous but also most uncharacteristic piece is the mysterious Capriccio ‘on the departure of a beloved brother’ which appears to be a work of Bach’s late teenage years, though no definite corroborative proof of its commission or purpose has yet come to light. Rather, it seems unique in Bach’s output as a humorous parody of styles and emotions.

Frank Peter Zimmermann, one of the most important violinists of our time, and his son Serge, who made his orchestral debut in 2000 at the age of nine with a violin concerto by Mozart, have succeeded in making a wonderful recording of the violin concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach together with the Berliner Barock Solisten. A great listening experience! The Double Concerto in D minor, one of Bach's most popular instrumental works, presents the principle of a contrapuntally linked, concertante dialogue between the solo violins in all movements.

The eminent Martha Argerich is one of the most loved and admired classical pianists of all time. She quickly gained and maintained world-wide reputation for her exciting performances. This set is the 9th volume of DOREMI’s special series of live performances and broadcasts featuring the artistry of the young Martha Argerich. The program features live recordings made between 1965 and 1973, and includes works by Beethoven, Prokofiev, Chopin, Schumann, and Bach. All items included are first release!

The magnificent Orchestral Suites, known as Ouvertüren in German, form the final instalment in Dunedin Consort’s long-running Bach Masterworks series for Linn, a series lauded as ‘nothing short of sensational’ by Gramophone. The intricate counterpoint and extraordinary technical demands present an opportunity, throughout these four sets of stately French-style overtures and dances, to demonstrate the virtuosic skill present in an ensemble of Dunedin’s caliber. The first two suites are scored for modest forces, yet the lightness and simplicity of touch conceals a complex musical language built on intimately interweaving parts. The third and fourth suites calls for trumpets, timpani, oboes, and a full complement of strings, thus making for a grand finale to Dunedin’s unrivalled Bach series. An insight into the ambition of this recording is offered in the title of the fourth suite’s final movement: for what better way to end the series than to fill listeners with immense ‘réjouissance’!

This album is the story of a dialogue between two voices: the singing voice and the voice of the cello, which has always been considered the instrument closest to the human voice. It is also the story of two worlds and the meeting of two cultures, East and West. The East we encounter here is Armenia, its thousand-year-old culture, its music and its songs, which resonate with the compositions of Bach, Kodály and Ligeti.

For the cellist Astrig Siranossian, vocal melody and the sound of the cello are two voices that she has always combined in her concerts, coupling a dance from a solo cello suite by Bach with an Armenian song that she performs with great sensitivity. East and West, Armenia and Europe: it is her roots and her emotions that the young cellist shares with us here. This recording was made on two different cellos, according to the repertory: an instrument by Francesco Ruggieri dating from 1676 and the famous Giovanni Gagliano of 1756 known as the ‘Sir John Barbirolli’.

The three sonatas by Bach of this album are likely to rank among the most famous and most performed compositions for viola da gamba, and they represent one of the tops of the literature for this instrument. Nevertheless for this recording was used the viola da braccio, according to the practice of the Baroque era which precedes and accompanies the decline of the viola da gamba. These pieces are composed as a trio sonata, a favorite genre by the Maestro. They are mainly based on polyphonic writing, in which no instrument prevails over the other. In some pieces the organ was used in place of the harpsichord, a choice of the performers to explore new varieties of timbre and offer different instrumental colors.

If the Arioso Quartett Wien, founded in 1994 and with a nearly unchanged lineup ever since, were to have a motto, it might be that. “Arioso” means “pertaining to the voice” but also “sonorous”. The name, as it were, says it all. But which sound is the desirable one? What’s the sound-ideal? The oft-quoted “Wiener Klang”, that particular way in which Viennese ensembles interpret orchestral and chamber music, is hard to define. What is it exactly – and is it really a thing? This ensemble is convinced: it does exist. But it doesn’t so much refer to externalities – where the bow hits the strings, for example, or how much pressure is used or whether and what specific vibrato is employed. Nor does it need fancy, expensive instruments (although they certainly don’t hurt). Hearsay has it, that members of American orchestras were often surprised that an orchestra can sound so good after they inspected the relatively “cheap” string instruments of their Viennese colleagues.

“Wiener Klang” really is more about an attitude - the way one approaches music. This includes taking into account the personal circumstances of the composer, their emotional and physical constitution at the time of writing the work in question, their mentality (to the extent that letters or eyewitness accounts have told us anything about that), and the surroundings in which the work at hand had been written.

Musicians in the Baroque period had to reinvent themselves time and again: their repertoire was not fixed. Instead, they improvised, adapted, and transcribed - something that was not seen as theft, but rather as an act of high virtue and ingenuity! Recorder player Max Volbers, the winner of the 2021 German Music Competition, revives this tradition on his solo debut album with GENUIN: he gathers top-class musicians around him for the recording of his own arrangements, paraphrases, and pastiches of works by Bach, Monteverdi, and Vivaldi. Works that are partly familiar to us, but which we have never heard before in this form - full of soul, inspired, and knowledgeably performed!

December is a time of anticipation. We wait and we hope – veni, come! The songs on this album encompass many nuances and moods – from joy and jubilant celebration to deep melancholy and longing. They move between folk tunes, English carols and traditional Christmas songs from different times and parts of the world, between Bach and Ives, Bulgaria and Norway. Several of the songs refer to the passing of the year, the cycle of nature and rhythms of daily life: lullabies for peace of mind and comfort, and songs about surrendering ourselves to the unfathomable and unknowable in the midst of our everyday concerns: the stars will always shine in the sky – and dawn will come. In others, we meet the little child born in a stable – vulnerable and yet immensely powerful.

In the nine years following the release of ‘Rós – Songs of Christmas’ [BIS-2029], the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir’s annual Christmas concerts under the leadership of Grete Pedersen have become a cherished tradition in their native country. They are joined on this recording by folk musicians Sondre Meisfjord and Marco Ambrosini and by their long-standing collaborator, the fiddler and composer Gjermund Larsen, who also appeared on the choir’s previous Christmas album.

When Johann Sebstian Bach composed his flute sonatas, the flute was in its infancy as a replacement for the popular recorder. Nevertheless, his musical genius rings out as richly layered harmony and emotions exude from each fluently written piece on J.S. BACH COMPLETE SONATAS FOR FLUTE & PIANO. On this two-disc recording, the mother-daughter duo of flutist Julie Scolnik, lauded by the Boston Globe for her “urgency full of fire that melts into disarming delicacy,” and pianist Sophie Scolnik-Brower further amplify Bach’s expressiveness, swapping the usual harpsichord for piano to deepen the dynamics and phrasing throughout the compositions.