Incantati brings together three instrumental timbres which were used in the baroque period to represent enchantment or otherworldliness, whether it be the touch of the supernatural, the moment of falling in love or the departure into the next world. The recorder’s sweet tone was associated with pastoral and amorous scenes, while the viola d’amore’s ethereal quality enhances moments of spirituality in both religious music and opera. In the Passions by J.S. Bach, the viola da gamba’s delicate sound accompanies the departure of Christ from life on earth. These three sonorities come together in incantati to create a uniquely charming sound, with each of the instruments clearly distinguishable, yet complementing each other.

This record is the second part of both the Sonatas and Partitas, recorded by Linus Roth. Not only did Roth’s teachers and the interpretations of great violinists have a huge influence on how he plays Bach, but also his preoccupation with the original text and with what is known as historically informed performance practice, in particular the experience of playing with the type of convex Baroque bow that was used in Bach’s time. Linus Roth, who received the ECHO KLASSIK Award as 'Best Newcomer' 2006 for his début album on the label EMI, was awarded his second ECHO award in 2017 for his recording of the violin concertos by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky with the London Symphony Orchestra under Thomas Sanderling. Linus Roth has made a name for himself internationally, not just with his acclaimed work in core repertoire, but also with his discovery / rediscovery of works that have undeservedly fallen into oblivion.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, otherwise known as Part Four of his Clavier-Übung “consisting of an Aria and Diverse Variations” intended to “refresh the spirits of connoisseurs”, is an impressive example of the art of variation. During the pandemic, the pianist Ragna Schirmer performed it for a small audience, mentally dedicating each variation to a different audience member. The result is a magnificent achievement that affords masterly proof of her passion for this work, a passion that has evolved over several decades.

Géza Anda performed regularly at the Lucerne International Music Festival from 1955-1969. Only from this period three recordings have survived, which are published here for the first time in their entirety. These are the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra BWV 1061 by Johann Sebastian Bach from the festival year 1955 and the 3rd Piano Concerto by Béla Bartók from 1965. Clara Haskil and Herbert von Karajan were Anda's partners for Bach, and Ernest Ansermet for Bartók, who was heard here for the last time in Lucerne. Also featured is Bartók's 2nd Piano Concerto, which Anda played with his favorite conductor Ferenc Fricsay before an enthusiastic audience. audite presents this important gap in the Anda discography in cooperation with the Géza Anda Foundation Zurich, Swiss Radio and Television (SRF), Salzburg's Eliette and Herbert von Karajan Institute, and Lucerne Festival.

Wilhelm Walter Friedrich Kempff was a German pianist and composer. Although his repertoire included Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms, Kempff was particularly well known for his interpretations of the music of Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert, recording the complete sonatas of both composers. Wilhelm Kempff’s 78-rpm recordings were very much focused on Beethoven, as can be heard on seven previously issued APR discs, but this release presents everything by other composers he set down from the start of electrical recording until the war. Notable among the titles are four of his own Bach transcriptions and, revealing the pianist in an unexpected light, his own virtuosic elaboration of the Schubert/Liszt ‘Hark, Hark! The Lark’ transcription.

REVIEW:

There's something special about these recordings, something quite miraculous. In spite of the relatively primitive technology involved in these early electrical recordings, I had no trouble at all forgetting sonic imperfections, and zeroing in on a great master channeling great composers. The French Suite no. 5 of Bach, recorded in 1935, is the highlight of the disc; it's a masterful interpretation. I was in awe of this from the first time I heard it, since I had the strong feeling that Kempff was communicating his own awe.

-- Music for Several Instruments

With this debut album, cellist Julia MacLaine expresses both her roots in classical music and her enthusiasm for contemporary music by creating a dialogue between Bach's preludes and responses crafted by six Canadian composers with styles as diverse as they are rich: Airat Ichmouratov, Gabriel Dharmoo, Carmen Braden, Nicole Lizée, Cris Derksen and Roy Johnstone.

Assistant principal cello of the National Arts Centre Orchestra since 2014, Julia MacLaine performs worldwide as a soloist, chamber, and orchestral musician in music ranging from classical to contemporary and from “world” to her own arrangements and compositions. When not onstage with NACO, she performs regularly with her string quartet, Ironwood. Their programs combine classical warhorses (Beethoven, Ravel, Debussy) with very new music (works by Ana Sokolovic, Nicole Lizée, Bryce Dessner, Philip Glass, Esa‐Pekka Salonen) and occasionally veer off into their own arrangements of original songs and folk music.

In contrast to the Well-Tempered Clavier, which remained omnipresent in general musical and cultural consciousness after J.S. Bach's death, and the Goldberg Variations, adorned in the 20th century with an almost mystical aura, Bach’s seven keyboard toccatas have been unjustly relegated to the shadows. Composed between about 1707 and 1713, the Toccatas contain "stylus phantasticus" (fantastical style) elements of the North German baroque and are a delightful mixture of virtuoso, recitative, arioso, concertante, imitative and fugal sections, entirely in the original musical sense of the word toccare, to explore by touch.

This recording also features Bach's Prelude and Fugue BWV 894, probably written during his Weimar phase. The title Prelude is perhaps a little misleading, since it is actually a concerto-like movement, and the fugue is also more like a gigue riding out on a ceaseless hunt. Bach ingeniously reshaped the work into his Triple Concerto BWV 1044 during his Leipzig period, interpolating a second movement taken from the Trio Sonata BWV 527. Wolfgang Rübsam came up with the original idea for this recording of transferring the middle movement of BWV 1044, lifted by Bach from BWV 527, to the equivalent position between the original Prelude and Fugue movements of BWV 894.

Bach demonstrably owned at least two lute-harpsichords, listed in his estate catalogue of 1750. Rübsam’s decision to record all these works on such an instrument has proved extremely fortuitous, especially with regard to the toccatas. The poetic tone of Keith Hill's instrument – sonorous and noble in the lower registers, brilliant in the higher registers – forms an almost perfect synthesis with Rübsam’s imaginative playing.

The concept of metanoia - that which goes beyond thought - most commonly describes a change in the way of seeing and thinking about things. With this recording, Italo-Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes and her chamber orchestra "K", together with the choir "Sequenza 9.3", go on a musical journey to find moments of metanoia in the lives and works of composers such as Giacomo Puccini, Arvo Pärt, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Alexander Borodin as well as Johann Sebastian Bach. Simone Menezes is a visionary musician, known for her creativity and innovative spirit and ability to brilliantly combine classical and contemporary repertoire. Whether as the founder and artistic director of chamber music ensemble “K”, as a coveted guest conductor with many of the world’s most respected orchestras or in her stunningly creative projects in partnership between music and other arts, Simone Menezes has established herself as a rising artist of a new generation.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach thought highly of the art of his father, Johann Sebastian. However, this did not prevent him from pursuing his own path. Even when Carl Philipp Emanuel made himself a candidate for the position of Thomaskantor as Johann Sebastian's successor, he did not reverently demonstrate his artistic ties to his father. Instead, he accentuated his compositional independence in one of his first choral works and confidently presented himself with a Magnificat. In Leipzig, this would inevitably subject him to direct comparison with his father, who, at the age of 38, as the newly appointed Thomaskantor, had also presented a Magnificat as his first major work on July 2, 1723. To this day, Carl Philipp Emanuel's Magnificat is measured against that of his father. In December 2020, the Gaechinger Cantorey chorus and orchestra under the musical direction of Hans-Christoph Rademann and together with an excellent ensemble of soloists performed both magnificent works together in concert - unfortunately in front of an empty hall but reaching their audience via livestream and recording it for this extraordinary release.

It was a momentous encounter: around 1714, the Weimar court organist Johann Sebastian Bach came across Antonio Vivaldi's Opus 3 L'Estro armonico, hot off the press, and soon nothing was the same for him musically. Bach eagerly appropriates the modern concerto style of the red priest from Venice. And true to the meaning of the word "concertare," which in Italian means "to unite," but in Latin means "to quarrel" or "to fight," Bach soon enters into a contest first with his Italian models and then with himself: Initially, he arranges Vivaldi's violin concertos for his (main) instrument, the organ. But then he implements Vivaldi's principles into his own instrumental concerto style. The result is his immortal Köthen Concertos for one to three solo instruments and orchestra, which fuse the concerto principle of structuring tutti ritornellos and interspersed imaginative solo episodes with Bach's unique skills of polyphonic thinking - highly virtuosic works in which all the participating instruments, as it were, sometimes connect with each other at eye level, sometimes enter into fierce competition with each other. All this can be heard on the third audite recording of the Thuringian Bach Collegium: a good 70 minutes of competition for the best musical arguments, presented with a sparkling virtuosity that no one can resist!

Dances are among the valuable "raw materials" that composers of all epochs have incorporated into their works. The suites of the Baroque period are based on dance forms from various countries, the classical symphonies usually contained a minuet or dance movement, and composers of emerging musical nations in the 19th century made use not only of folk songs but also, and above all, of the dances of their home regions in order to form an independent language. In this album, harpist Sarah Christ shows that dance is as rich in moods as it is in forms: On her album Un bal - named after the second movement of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique - we hear the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, which moves so wonderfully freely within the framework of strict baroque models, the melancholy elegance in Chopin's and Debussy's waltzes, the folklore and rusticity in the pieces of Ferenc Farkas and Manuel de Falla, and the melancholy of Astor Piazzolla's tangos.

Both JS Bach's six Trio Sonatas and Mendels­sohn's six Organ Sonatas are conceived as tutorial pieces - an "organ school" - to help attain demanding playing skills at the highest musical level. We know from Bach that he wrote his sonatas for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann. Mendelssohn is known to have been familiar with Bach's sonatas and their pedagogical purpose. He gradually developed his own Organ Sonatas, originally for the English market: they are equal in number to Bach's sonatas, as well as in their intention as instructive pieces, "a kind of organ school", as Mendelssohn himself wrote to the publisher. Johann Sebastian Bach composed into his six Trio Sonatas "the sum of all the difficulties that a teacher wants a gifted pupil to master" (Marie-Claire Alain); written between 1727 and 1732, they remain a touchstone for every organist to this day. A good hundred years later, Mendelssohn created his Organ Sonatas - among other things, the independent and prominent pedal treatment (each movement features a pedal solo) and the frequent playing on several manuals challenge the player in the same spirit. Anything but monotonous studies, the results in both cases were masterpieces of the highest order.

This project represents a starting point in gently opening up the possibilities of incorporating an element of improvisation into the oeuvre of Bach's chamber music. Given that both Toshi and Anthony are improvising musicians, able and willing to extemporize in a variety of genres (jazz, folk music, early music, etc.), but also being devotees of the repertoire and musical language of Bach, it seemed natural to use certain works of Bach’s as a basis for new invention. The result is a fresh approach to Bach, where improvisation is part of the overall soundscape, whether through ornamentation, basso continuo or entire passages opened up for ‘jamming’. The instrumentation for this program is also diverse, with Toshi and Anthony using two instruments each; broadening the timbral spectrum. This project is, for them, a crucial way in exploring just how we can be both faithful to the score and true to ourselves as creative musicians interested in mastering this musical language.

The present release is the first volume in Cantata Collective’s exploration of the Cantatas of JS Bach. Cantata Collective is San Francisco's only professional Ensemble dedicated solely to the performance of the Cantatas of J.S. Bach. "A group of local early-music luminaries devoted to the composer's 200-plus compositions in the genre" (San Francisco Chronicle), Cantata Collective is supported by an enthusiastic Board of Directors, and endorsed by an illustrious Advisory Board. Together with its "congregation" it has created a magical community of listeners who share in this traversal of musical treasures. Cantata Collective presents these iconic works as the equivalent of a World Heritage Site, a collection of masterworks belonging to all people.

Newly signed to the naïve label, violinist Fabio Biondi, the celebrated founder and director of Europa Galante, here presents his interpretation of one of the major peaks of the solo violin repertoire: the Sonatas and Partitas of Bach. For many years a passionate devotee of this Holy Grail of violinists, and having performed many of the works individually in the course of his career, Fabio Biondi is now, at the age of sixty, using his maturely ripened art to record the complete set for the very first time: it is the culmination of long and patient study, as well as of a process of personal development. For years Biondi was intimidated by Bach’s writing for solo violin: so intimate, yet so universal, so close to the essence of things – which the music often expresses through silence and pure, untranslateable sound – and so technically demanding as well.