As time goes on, Helmuth Rilling and the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart's achievement only grows in stature, especially now that Teldec's Bach Edition has vanished into Warner's heedless maw. In particular, Rilling's unaffectedly musical, period-performance-influenced but undogmatic approach seems designed to sustain long-term listener satisfaction. He's so strong in the basic qualities that matter most. For example, he has the best soloists of any major series of Bach vocal works--names like Arlene Auger, Juliane Banse, Matthias Goerne, Christophe Prégardien, Christine Schäfer--the list reads like a "who's who" of major late-20th-century singers. The choral singing also is uniformly superb.

Instrumental soloists are no less distinguished: Trevor Pinnock, Robert Levin, Evgeni Koroliev, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, and many others. As an instrumental conductor, Rilling isn't as overtly flashy as you'll find with some of the trendier period-instrument groups, but his mastery of Bach's idiom is never in doubt, and while you can perhaps do better in individual works (including Rilling's own last version of the B minor Mass), I can say with complete conviction that nothing here is less than very good as either performance or sound. In terms of sheer consistency the quality here is astonishing, and in terms of value for dollar this is unbeatable.

The 172 CDs come packaged with a CD-ROM containing all notes and texts (more than 5,000 pages). Certainly this is one of the great achievements in the history of recordings, and it's very satisfying to see that the Hänssler team understands the value of what it has done, and takes pride in the accomplishment. If you want the complete Bach, this is the obvious choice.

– David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Details:
- Dimensions: approx. 41 x 14,5 x 14,5 cm
- Weight: approx. 4 kg
- 1 CD Rom as an E-book with 5.000 pages, including all song texts, introductions, biographical notes in German, English, French and Spanish, and a search function for looking into the texts, paging and marking throughout
- 2 books with BWV- (288 pages) and CD- (144 pages) number listing and additional information (12,5 cm x 12,5 cm)

This 26-CD set containing CPE Bach’s complete solo piano works represents a landmark of the highest importance and, more significantly, listening pleasure. Ana-Marija Markovina has made a specialty of playing these works. She previously recorded the Prussian and Württemburg sonatas (for Genuin), but it is difficult to overstate the richness and variety found on these discs, or Markovina’s consistent success in rendering it all with such freshness, excitement, intensity, and charm. CPE Bach’s keyboard output consists primarily of sonatas, dozens of them, ranging over the entire course of his career, roughly from the 1740s through the 1780s. Most are three-movement pieces in fast-slow-fast form, but there are also rondos, fantasias, variations, character pieces, teaching pieces, arrangements of concertos and other orchestral works, dances, and everything from the very simple to the exceptionally complex, both technically and expressively—an entire world. More astonishingly, the quality of this music is almost uniformly high. Bach was a true craftsman, and while everyone will have their favorite works–and it’s pointless to say that it’s all equally good–you can sample just about anything on any of these discs and you will find plenty to enjoy and captivate your attention.

Markovina plays this music on the modern piano, the instrument that comes closest to any available in Bach’s day to realizing his clearly notated intentions. For example, he almost always asks for a full range of dynamics, from pp to ff, and his writings make clear that he valued above all a beautifully sustained, singing tone. The clavichord offered him the most possibilities in this regard at the start of his career, while in his last years his clear preference was for the piano (even though he had expressed reservations about early versions of the instrument in his 1750s Essay on the True Art of Playing the Keyboard). Markovina exploits the piano’s full dynamic range, as well as its ability to vary articulation, sustain the melodic line, and add muscle to Bach’s emphatic and often syncopated rhythmic schemes. In this respect she is far bolder than, say, Danny Driver’s genteel, almost effeminate CPE Bach recordings on Hyperion.

However, the most telling comparison has to be made with Miklós Spányi’s ongoing series of the complete keyboard works for BIS. Spányi uses period instruments, which have some advantages (the clavichord’s vibrato, for example), but also all of their inadequacies, including a lack of sustaining power and often a great deal of mechanical noise. On the piano, Bach’s music sounds modern; on early instruments, it sounds old. This contrast is exacerbated by Spányi’s inability to play a true allegro at speed. Consider, for example, the marvelous Sonata in B minor Wq. 65/13, which dates from the 1740s. The finale is marked “Allegro molto”. Spányi takes about six minutes (on the clavichord), Markovina slightly more than three. The difference in both sonority and expressive intensity is shocking, with Markovina infinitely more powerful and exciting.

CPE Bach’s modern reputation rests largely on his music in the “empfindsamer Stil”, with its highly expressive, emotionally eruptive, and constantly surprising writing; but a little-known aspect of this style was also the attempt to imbue music with a genuine sense of humor. Haydn, for example, learned a great deal from Bach’s pregnant use of silence. So rather than offer the usual examples of minor-key pathos, I offer as a listening sample the start of “L’Aly Rupalich”, a character piece also provisionally entitled “La Bach”, and possibly intended as a self-portrait of the composer. CPE Bach scholar Paul Corneilson describes the work as “a disco piece”, and how right he is.

Corneilson is also the Managing Editor of the Packard Humanities Institute’s ongoing CPE Bach Complete Edition, and it is largely thanks to that organization that this set of recordings has been made possible. CPE Bach fans, then, should be delighted to know that Corneilson has assembled an absolutely splendid volume of scores under the title The Essential C.P.E. Bach, containing 25 “greatest hits” from the composer’s keyboard, chamber, orchestral, and vocal music. Retailing for only $50, this beautifully printed, 350-page volume also contains excellent introductions to the composer as well as all of the music contained therein, a bibliography, a select discography, and a concordance that helps to locate each work by Wotquenne and Helm numbers.

Highlights include not only “L’Aly Rupalich”, a selection of sonatas, and the wonderful Rondo in E minor subtitled “Farewell to My Silberman Clavichord”, but also the Sonata for Unaccompanied Flute, the programmatic Sonata in C minor for Two Violins and Bass, and the amazingly dark Fantasia in F-sharp minor for Violin and Keyboard “CPE Bach’s Emotions”. There are also two complete symphonies, two complete concertos, and among the vocal pieces a bit of the celebrated Magnificat and the extraordinary Heilig for double chorus and double orchestra, a masterwork that everyone who loves Bach (Sr.) and Handel really must hear (there’s a fabulous performance on Harmonia Mundi).

You can order the score directly here, and I can’t recommend this elegant and smartly assembled volume highly enough. The same holds true of Markovina’s big box of Bach. I know, 26 CDs is a lot, and you’re not going to be playing them every day, but the important thing to remember is that you could, and you’d never be bored.

David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

East West explores musical landscapes from the European and American parts of the globe, resulting in a kind of travel journal that begins in Eastern Europe and then travels westward Duo Aliada is known for their creative approach to adapting classical repertoire for their own instruments. Polish saxophonist Michal Knot and Serbian accordionist Bogdan Laketic formed the duo in 2013 in Vienna, a city whose rich musical tradition reflects its history as a crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe. The following years brought Michal and Bogdan to performances around the world, and into contact with various cultures and musical traditions. This wide range of experiences, beginning all the way back with their childhoods in Eastern Europe, is a major source of inspiration for their music making and for this album.

Although the writing of music history may purport to be an objective activity, it seldom does people justice, even allowing for the great differences of opinion as to what on earth “justice” means in the context of a composer's merit. If one narrows down the dubious concept of fairness to appreciation - to classification as part of one of the great currents of development - one may venture a little further before realizing that fairness is not timeless, but subject to trends and conventions; it fluctuates in parallel with the passing of time and the level of academic knowledge.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was and remains subject to this fluctuation. The present release explores the composer’s life in a new and expanded edition, which includes the World Premiere Recording of C.P.E. Bach´s Cantata “Ich bin vergnügt in meinem Stande“ and his famous Piano Concertos under the direction of Reinhard Goebel. Together, his works make a strong case for greatness in our present day.

REVIEWS:

[This] is truly an incredible bargain, one that no lover of C. P. E. Bach in particular or of mid-18th-century music in general, can afford to pass up. This is a serious candidate for my 2022 Want List. Urgently, enthusiastically recommended.

--Fanfare

This towering musical document is also a profound insight on the development of the baroque to the classical, regarding style and structure. A pyramid of inestimable musical beauty that should keep you company for years on end. Sound quality can sometimes vary slightly, but when one keeps in mind that this is a project that was spread over a huge number of recording sessions, that is understandable. Otherwise, this is an epic undertaking that deserves my unconditional recommendation.

--Classical Music Daily

“The few documents I had collected gave me the feeling that I was standing on the threshold of a wonderful cave, like that of Ali Baba, which I had the opportunity to explore at will. Since that time I must confess that I cannot remember how many people I have contacted, nor communities and towns visited, nor how often I have stayed, for short or longer periods, in five countries of the eastern Mediterranean. My investigations were in no way limited to poetry and song. Folklore constitutes a whole world, and I was anxious in particular to know that of my people.” Alberto Hemsi wrote these words just two years before he died, in a retrospective as a foreword to the last and tenth volume of his opus magnum, the collection of works for voice and piano known as Coplas Sefardies. More than fifty years earlier, at the beginning of the 1920s, he had begun to collect examples of the folklore of the Sephardi Jews – “his people” – and to arrange them for concert performance. The present release features the world premiere recording of the original version

Christian Cannabich himself – at first leader of the orchestra, then director of instrumental music at the court of Carl Theodor – was one of those who engaged with the new form of music drama. Cannabich, who mostly composed symphonies, chamber music and ballet suites and enjoyed the reputation among his contemporaries of being an excellent orchestra mentor, created the stage work Electra in 1781 with a setting of words by Mannheim intendant von Dalberg. From its beginnings in France, the melodrama established itself in the 1770s as an independent form of music drama, with particular success in the German-speaking territories. The newly introduced combination of speech and instrumental music was in keeping with the zeitgeist: efforts to establish a German-language opera had always foundered against preconceptions of German as a weighty language ill-suited to being sung, and melodrama got round the perceived problem with German texts that were not sung but spoken.

Time and again the four members of the Verdi Quartet have successfully communicated their own enthusiasm to their audiences, for instance at the great festivals at Schwetzingen, Ludwigsburg and Zermatt, the Mozart Festival at Lille (France), the Orlando Festival in Kerkrade (Netherlands) and the Bach Festival in Oregon, where they were appointed Quartet in Residence. Their national and international commitments have taken the quartet to virtually all the leading concert venues, not only in Europe but also in the USA, Canada, Africa and South Korea. They have appeared with eminent performers such as Norbert Brainin, Siegmund Nissel and Martin Lovett, Bruno Giuranna, Alfredo Perl, Günter Ludwig, Rudolf Meister and Matthias Kirschnereit. Since 2003, the quartet has had a festival of its own, “vielsaitig” in Füssen, a mixture of concerts, chamber music and solo master classes, as well as a symposium for string instruments making. The members of the quartet are also sought-after teachers. They teach singly and as a group at the academies in Mannheim and Rostock, and at workshops in many of the world’s countries. On this impressive release, the ensemble tackles the entirety of J.S. Bach’s oeuvre for string quartet.

“Gift Voucher: six Suites for Slava” This note, scribbled on a paper napkin was a promise supposedly made in 1964 by Benjamin Britten to the cellist Mstislav Leopoldovich “Slava” Rostropovich. It would appear that he wanted to compose for his friend a contemporary counterpart to Bach’s Solo Suites, which for any cellist are a sort of Old Testament in the cello repertoire. Britten took Baroque dance movements as a model and formed them into modern character pieces. Both from the point of view of form and tone, they exude a kinship and affinity with Johann Sebastian Bach. The fact that he actually only composed three suites was due to Britten’s poor health and his death not long afterwards. Britten’s encounter with Mstislav Rostropovich was the motive and inspiration for his cello works: they had met in the early 1960s through Dmitry Shostakovich at a performance by Rostropovich of the Soviet composer’s First Cello Concerto. Shostakovich is said to have complained after the concert of bruised ribs because during the concert Britten had often jabbed him in the ribs out of pure enthusiasm for the music. That enthusiasm led Benjamin Britten to dedicate his cello suites to the exceptional cellist. (Jakob Spahn)

Swantje Asche-Tauscher belongs to that generation of young German violinists who win people over with their “expressive, sonorous playing”. At the age of 14, this talented artist appeared as a soloist in the Stuttgart Liederhalle. She had played at the Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, performs at festivals such as the Palermo Classica Festival, and is a lecturer at Strings in Motion. For the 2019/2020 season, Swantje Asche-Tauscher held the position of principal second violinist in the Tyrol Symphony Orchestra in Innsbruck. Markos Destefanos is one of the most promising classical guitarists of his generation. Eliot Fisk describes his playing as “charismatic and well-thought-out”, while praising his “powerful intellect”. In addition to winning national and international prizes, Markos Destefanos was awarded a scholarship by the foundation “Live Music Now”, as well as a performance scholarship by the Mozarteum University. He currently teaches at the State Music School of Upper Austria, and increasingly presents masterclasses at home and abroad. Furthermore, since 2018 he has been working as a scientific consultant for the successful music education platform “Tonebase”.

Her playing may aptly be described as emotional and intense. Displaying “amazing expressiveness and brilliance” (Westfalenpost) and “an empathy that touches one deep inside” (Märkische Allgemeine), Gerlint Böttcher fascinates her audiences in Europe, Asia, America and the Middle East. She makes solo appearances with such celebrated orchestras as Berlin’s Konzerthaus Orchestra, the South-West German Chamber Orchestra of Pforzheim, the Berlin Symphony, the Ryazan Philharmonic in Russia, the Philharmonic State Orchestra in Halle and the Brandenburg State Orchestra of Frankfurt an der Oder under such conductors as Sergey Oselkov, Heribert Beissel, Timo Handschuh and Nicholas Milton. The pianist is a regular performer at major festivals; in cooperation with the Bayreuth Festival, she has repeatedly played at Haus Wahnfried in Bayreuth. Many of the compositions that she has premiered were written expressly for her by composers of the first rank. Alongside the solo repertoire, which takes first place in her artistic life, she takes part in programmes of genuine rarities together with such partners as Echo Klassik prizewinners Bassiona Amorosa and actor Hans-Jürgen Schatz.

Classical Music

Isabelle Faust is today considered to be one of the most fascinating artists of the younger generation in Europe. Her technical brilliance and the special sensitivity and maturity of her artistry have met with acclaim from audiences and reviewers alike. Isabelle Faust plays the "Sleeping Beauty" Stradivarius of 1704, loaned to her by the Landeskreditbank Baden-Württemberg. Christoph Poppen has made a name for himself in the world of international music as conductor, soloist and chamber musician, as well as being a respected teacher. For this artist, who was born in 1956 in Muenster, music is one of the most intense ways to experience life. He has won a great number of international violin competitions.

“After several decades of debate, it is now firmly established that the Art of Fugue was composed for harpsichord. The notation on four staves could lead to confusion and wrongly suggest that the work was intended for an ensemble of four instruments. But this scheme of notation for a keyboard instrument was not uncommon in the past (e.g. it was used by the Italian Girolamo Frescobaldi in his Fiori Musicali), as it facilitates the visualization and grasp of each individual voice's progression and beauty. I am convinced that played appropriately and with artistic integrity, the piano can serve Bach's music superbly. In this recording I have played entirely without pedal so that the splendour of the contrapuntal lines is fully rendered. In some cases, for instance an appoggiatura, the piano allows for perfect imitation of a form of vocality, like a singer following the tonic accents of a language and pronouncing one syllable more quietly than another. The harpsichord can only imitate this by agogic inflections, by playing in an irregular rhythm. Some vocally inspired passages can therefore sound magnificent on the piano.“ (Eloïse Bella Kohn)

Contains Cantatas BWV 36, 40, 57, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 91, 110, 121, 122, 123, 132, 133, 151 & 191.

REVIEW:

Before Christmas and much of its music was commercialised, there was Bach – pre-eminently the greatest composer of the season, unfailingly cutting to the emotional and spiritual quick of the texts he set to music. This six-disc box of Advent and Christmas cantatas from Helmuth Rilling’s complete series is a wonderful digest of Bach’s unparallelled achievement in this area.

The intensity of colour and expression in these works is stunning – the surging, brass-capped elation of Unser Mund sei voll Lachens, so full of the simple joy of the Christian message, the searching meditation on temptation in Selig ist der Mann, the seemingly bottomless well of spiritual sustenance plumbed in the chorale conclusions.

The soloists are generally distinguished, and sometimes excellent – tenor Peter Schreier and soprano Arleen Augér both give object lessons in Bach style in their Schwingt freudig euch empor arias, while Helen Donath, Helen Watts and Kurt Equiluz are among other well-known singers making a contribution.

Rilling’s performances (on modern instruments) are neatly tailored and naturally benevolent in nature, buoyant with the wholesomeness and warmth that this great music so frequently emanates. There is simply no better way of celebrating a musical Christmas.


Performance: 5 (out of 5), Sound: 4 (out of 5)

-- Terry Blain, BBC Music Magazine

When Johann Sebastian Bach assumed the position of Thomaskantor in Leipzig in 1723, he did so having previously affirmed to the City authorities by contractual guarantee that the music he was to compose for divine service in the pious mercantile city would not sound operatic. Another of the unalterable customs in Leipzig was that the high voice parts in church music should not be sung by women, a widely applied consequence drawn from the counsel of the Apostle Paul. [“Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak” (1 Corinthians 14:34, KJV). - Translator’s note] This album is the proof that Bach set his sacred works to music whose emotional and dramatic force stood comparison with the best operatic music of his day.