In 1995 Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan began the monumental task of recording J.S. Bach’s extant church cantatas – an adventure that was brought to a close 18 years later. But Bach also composed a number of cantatas for secular occasions of which some twenty works have survived intact. Released on individual discs between 2004 and 2018, Masaaki Suzuki’s recordings of these works have now been gathered in a box set, available as a limited edition. The secular cantatas were written (both the texts and the music) for special events in the family, social, academic or political calendar – a wedding, a birthday celebration, an academic ceremony or a tribute to a prince. Although they were normally only performed once in their original form, Bach was keen to reuse material from them, if the opportunity arose. The best-known examples of using secular arias and choruses with new sacred texts are found in the Christmas Oratorio, for which Bach drew extensively on three festive cantatas written for the Prince-Elector of Saxony and his family. Included in the release is a 156-page booklet with an introduction by Bach specialist Dr Klaus Hofmann (in English, German and French) and the texts of the cantatas with English translations.

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Excerpts of reviews from previously released volumes included in this set:

Bach: Secular Cantatas, Vol. 10 - Cantatas of Contentment:

We celebrate here, as always, many of Suzuki’s finest qualities of expressive lucidity, unforced coherence, and the quiet nobility of one serving the music as the most natural of reflexes.

– Gramophone

Bach: Secular Cantatas, Vol. 8 - Celebratory Cantatas:

Schleicht, spielende Wellen (‘Flow, playful waves and murmur’) follows the dramma per musica template of allegory – this time with four competing rivers yearning for the primacy of the monarch’s affections. However ludicrous, Bach constructs a very significant work which Suzuki treats as an undertaking of serious critical engagement. After 22 years of intensive Bach recording, Suzuki and his forces just seem to get better.

– Gramophone

Bach Secular Cantatas, Vol. 5 - Birthday Cantatas:

Lithe choral singing, balletic rhythms, and a detailed yet transparent sound. Joanne Lunn is agile and fleet as the goddess of War…Robin Blaze is lyrical as the goddess Pallas…Makoto Sakurada's lucid tenor is particularly effective in the rhetorical and declamatory recitatives, while bass Dominik Wörner paints the words to vivid effect.

– BBC Music Magazine

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Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was more systematic than many of his composer colleagues when it came to keeping track of his own works and made at least two catalogues of his compositions for solo keyboard. At various times he also destroyed manuscripts that remained in his possession, especially those of early works. But even so, there are a number of pieces that slipped through the net, and several of them can be found on this album. A few of them were included anonymously into the second Clavierbuchlein for Anna Magdalena Bach, while Emanuel Bach was still living in his father’s home in Leipzig. Among the pieces are some that have been identified as being by Bach only recently, during the ongoing work of producing a printed edition of the composer’s complete works. As devised by Miklos Spanyi, the programme is a colourful mix of brief dance movements and other miniatures, provides both variety and insights into the formative years of the composer. It ends with Bach’s Variations on a Menuet by Locatelli, the most technically demanding of his variation sets composed in 1735 when he was a young man of 21.

Very little is known about the origin of J. S. Bach’s seven Toccatas (BWV?910–916) or of their use. They are believed to have been written before 1717 or the end of Bach’s Weimar period – but it is quite possible that at least some of them were drafted before he arrived there in 1707, at the age of 22. The Toccatas are usually performed on harpsichord or piano – but even though they are ‘manualiter’ (intended to be played by the hands only) and do not call for pedal parts, they are also occasionally heard on the organ. In terms of style they are examples of the so-called stylus phantasticus – ‘the most free and unfettered method of composition’ – and belong to the North German organ tradition of the late 17th century. Each piece consists of several distinct and contrasting sections, interweaving strict counterpoint and fugal passages with freely rhapsodic material, and as such the toccatas differ from the two-movement prelude-and-fugue format which Bach later would put his own, indelible stamp on. With this disc, Masaaki Suzuki takes on some of the earliest of Bach’s extant harpsichord compositions, after having released acclaimed recordings of a wide range of later works, from the two-part Inventions to the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier. However, he also brings his experience in performing the music of Bach’s North German predecessors to bear, for instance Buxtehude (BIS-1809) and Nicolaus Bruhns.

REVIEW:

Since completing his Bach cantata cycle, conductor and keyboardist Masaaki Suzuki has turned to Bach's keyboard music. The results have been consistently satisfying, as one would expect from this great contemporary Bach interpreter, but even Suzuki fans might have wondered what he would do with these six rarely played toccatas. There are more purely dramatic readings of these works, mostly played on piano, but Suzuki is attuned to this music, and his performances are not in the least colorless. Bach's intense Adagios, like that of the Toccata in E minor, BWV 914, and the irregular structures of the music have snap and surprise. Suzuki's 1982 harpsichord, based on an enlarged Ruckers instrument, is an excellent choice for the music, and anyone whose Bach collection is missing these remarkable works can do well with this choice.

-- ALlMusic.com (James Manheim)

Those who enjoyed the London Baroque's 1985 Harmonia Mundi recording of Bach's trio sonatas needn't worry about duplication on this new BIS offering. This time violinist Richard Gwilt has transcribed six of Bach's sonatas BWV 525-530 that survive in manuscript form for organ (which scholarship has since revealed were transcriptions themselves). Also unlike the London Baroque's previous recording, Gwilt has scored no wind parts in favor of a more straightforward "classic combination" of two violins and continuo. What has not changed is the evident passion and plain joy the group still continues to bring to Bach.

A comparison of Gwilt's transcription of Sonata BWV 525 with the equally lovely though very different recent BMC offering by the Gyöngyössy-Hadady-Lakatos-Dobozy ensemble (see review Q5061) not only testifies to the versatility and durability of Bach's music, it also explains why because of those possibilities so many musicians return to it. First, the London Baroque account is performed on period violins while the G-H-L-D ensemble utilizes a modern flute and oboe. The tempos also vary, with the London Baroque favoring slightly swifter tempos throughout, particularly in the opening and closing movements. Both of these widely differing interpretations are equally captivating and offer much to enjoy; choice will depend strictly on whether you prefer the more crisp-sounding, sprightlier performance on BIS or the gentler, more pensive wind account on BMC. My advice is to not miss out on either; and while you're at it, add the sumptuously diabolical Rare Fruits Council recording on Astrée/Naïve for a trilogy of Bach trio sonata heaven!

BIS's sound is up to its usual audiophile standards. Gwilt's engaging notes are on par with his equally stylish fiddle playing and the shining performances of veteran colleagues violinist Ingrid Seifert, cellist Charles Medlam, and relative newcomer, harpsichordist Terence Charlston. A winner!
--John Greene, ClassicsToday.com

There are many questions surrounding Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Six Solos for violin’, or the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, as they are usually called today. When did he compose them, and why, and for whom? In what circumstances were they performed? And why would a master of polyphony choose to write for a melody instrument with limited scope for polyphony or chords? We can only guess at the answers – which makes the works all the more fascinating. The legendary violinist George Enescu famously described the set as ‘the Himalayas of violinists’, but for more than 200 years they were primarily regarded as pedagogical exercises rather than compositions worthy of the concert hall. Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann tried to popularize them by making versions with piano accompaniment, while Busoni did away with the violin altogether in his transcription of the famous Chaconne from Partita No. 2. But since Yehudi Menuhin made the first complete recording of the Sonatas and Partitas, between 1929 and 1936, they have become a staple during violin recitals, on disc and in concert. Fascinating performers and audiences alike with their architectural perfection as well as their emotional range, these are works that lend themselves to very different interpretations, and on this recording it is the Bach of Finnish violinist Jaakko Kuusisto we hear. Himself a composer – as well as violinist and conductor – Kuusisto remembers beginning to study individual movements from the set at the age of ten. The music has been with him ever since, and to him ‘no other works for the violin provide a higher challenge or greater beauty’.

REVIEW:

Kuusisto plays with an offhanded, technical nonchalance, as if there were neither any of the traditional expectations or technical hurdles to overcome. Everything sounds so organic and natural that listening becomes increasingly enjoyable. The musical detail can certainly be heard, yet Kuusisto does not force that conspicuously on the listener.

– Klassikheute.com (Germany)

Described as the ‘Pianists’ Old Testament’, The Well-Tempered Clavier is a collection of pieces of exceptional artistic quality. No other work from the baroque period has been as valued, performed and studied as this collection whose objectives were musical, theoretical and didactic.

Both books of The Well-Tempered Clavier feature a prelude and fugue in each of the 12 semitones of the chromatic scale, covering each of the 24 major and minor modes – a unique body of works. No two preludes or fugues are alike; they display the full range of contrapuntal devices, while the preludes offer an infinite variety of melodic, rhythmic and constructional possibilities. Each of these pieces demonstrates a mastery of counterpoint that never takes precedence over emotion, beauty and aesthetics. With the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach established himself as the unrivalled master of the fugue genre.

Following his recordings of Bach’s concertos for one and two harpsichords (BIS-2041, BIS 2051 and BIS-2481), which reviewers have praised for his unaffected playing and acute musicianship, Masato Suzuki now offers us his take on this Bach monument.

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BARBERCTO & SONATA FOR CELLO & ORCH.POLTERA (CELLO); BERGEN P.O. POLTERA (CELLO); BERGEN P.O./LITTON; STOTT (PIANO) CTO & SONATA FOR CELLO & ORCH.; ADAGIO FOR STRINGS

Previous releases from the New York-based Escher Quartet include an acclaimed set of Mendelsohn’s six string quartets as well as an album with works by Dvorák, Tchaikovsky and Borodin. For their latest offering the members have looked closer to home, however, choosing to combine the quartets by Samuel Barber and Charles Ives. The disc opens with Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, containing the music for which the composer remains best-known: the second movement which he two years later expanded into Adagio for Strings. Recognizing its potential already while composing it, Barber described the piece as ‘a knock-out’ – which made it all the more difficult to come up with a third movement worthy to follow it. In the end he decided to make the quartet a two-movement work, but the Eschers have here included the lively third movement that the composer discarded, offering the opportunity to hear the work as it was once planned. Barber is followed by the two full-scale quartets by Charles Ives, as well as a brief Scherzo. Like many other compositions by Ives, his First Quartet makes extensive use of revival and gospel hymns, quoting them in all four movements in a highly accessible tonal idiom. Far more challenging, the Second Quartet is a portrayal of ‘four men / who converse, discuss, argue ... fight, shake hands, shut up / then walk up the mountainside to view the firmament’ – a programme which invites a liberal use of dissonance, but also – towards the end – a particularly fulfilling resolution.

REVIEW:

Here's a nifty album of American chamber music that works on several levels. The Escher String Quartet offers a crisp reading of Barber's quartet as a whole that does not overdo the sentiment in the Adagio. There are also clear readings of Charles Ives' two string quartets, one broadly tonal, one conceptual and modern. So, a good choice for listeners wanting to broaden their appreciation of Barber and Ives, but the album also has much to offer those who have thought deeply about these composers. There is also a welcome performance of one of Ives' bracingly humorous Three Pieces for String Quartet, the second piece, "Hold Your Own!" In short, there is something for almost everyone in this fine release.

– AllMusicGuide.com (James Manheim)

BAROQUE ARIAS: BACH, HANDEL, AHLE, BY Yoshikazu Mera

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A 2021 GRAMMY Nominee for Best Opera Recording!

Composed in 1911, Bluebeard’s Castle is Béla Bartók’s only opera – a radical masterpiece which has secured a place alongside the other innovative music dramas of the same period, from Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande to Berg’s Wozzeck. Planning to write a one-act opera, Bartók settled on a libretto by Béla Balázs with the kind of surreal and/or macabre themes that would soon feature in his two ballets, The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin. The main source for the libretto text was a play by Maeterlinck, a retelling of Perrault’s gruesome tale of Barbe-Bleue, the sinister yet strangely seductive wife-killer. Balázs turned the drama into what he called a ‘mystery play’, however, and his stylization of the story throws the weight of the drama onto stage-setting and music. The single act centers on the successive opening of the castle’s seven doors, and Bartók’s music brings across the horrors of the blood-drenched torture chamber, the steely power of the armory and the glitter of jewels in the treasury as well as the interplay of increasingly feverish questionings from Judit and defiant responses from Bluebeard. Susanna Mälkki and the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra have already proved their Bartók credentials with a disc of his ballet scores which was chosen as Record of the Week in BBC Radio 3 Record Review and earned top marks in Diapason and on the website Klassik-Heute. Joined by Mika Kares as Duke Bluebeard and his Judit, the Hungarian mezzo-soprano Szilvia Vörös, the team here performs Bartók’s darkly glittering, shimmering and threatening score in a live recording from 2020.

REVIEW:

Mezzo soprano Szilvia Vörös copes very well with the demands of her role. When the Fifth Door is flung open, Vörös’s scream - for that’s what it is - is simply hair-raising. As always, BIS complete the package with excellent notes, and, in this case, a legible, attractively presented libretto.

Although Mälkki’s Bluebeard doesn’t supplant the best in the catalogue, it deserves a place alongside them; as for the sound, it’s well up to the high standards of the house.

– MusicWeb International

On two highly praised albums, Susanna Mälkki and her players in the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra have released recordings of Béla Bartók’s three scores for the stage – The Miraculous Mandarin, The Wooden Prince and Bluebeard’s Castle, all written before 1918. The team now takes on two of his late orchestral masterpieces. Composed in 1936 for the Basel Chamber Orchestra, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta is one of the purest examples of Bartók’s mature style, with its synthesis of folk music, classicism and modernism. One immediately striking feature is the unusual instrumentation: two string orchestras seated on opposite sides of the stage, with percussion and keyboard instruments in the middle and towards the back. In 1940, during the Second World War, Bartók emigrated to the U.S.A., where he initially found it difficult to compose. In 1943 he received a prestigious commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, however, and in less than eight weeks he composed the Concerto for Orchestra. In it he worked with contrasts between different sections of the orchestra, and the soloistic treatment of these groupings was his reason for calling the work a concerto rather than a symphony.

REVIEW:

There hasn’t been a coupling of these two iconic works this successful in, well, decades. Usually the pieces get divided between different performers, or if it’s the same forces throughout, one work comes off better than the other. Not here. Start with the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. No one (except possibly Reiner) attempts to play it at Bartók’s indicated timings–around six+ minutes per movement. Everyone is slower, and often rightly so, but sometimes rather too much slower. Mälkki sounds just about perfect: in the range of seven minutes per movement, with an eerily flowing opening fugue, a ferocious second movement Allegro, a terrifying Adagio (listen to those timpani glissandos at the bottom of the texture), and a finale that features an imaginative and characterful flexibility of tempo, highlighting its dance-like character. The Helsinki strings play with extraordinary discipline, even if some of the “special effects” such as col legno bowing could resister more strongly. Never mind. It’s a great performance.

So is that of the Concerto for Orchestra. Perhaps the best thing I can say about it is that it sounds like a genuine collaborative effort between conductor and orchestra. Mälkki keeps the music flowing, reveling in the fine ensemble that the Helsinki Philharmonic has become: the brass fugato in the first movement, the “games of pairs” in the second, or the eerie woodwind solos in the brooding Elegia–nothing here is less than world-class. In the finale, Mälkki finds an idea balance between hard-driving forward movement and precision of articulation. She also keep something especially exciting in reserve for the coda, which dashes away thrillingly. BIS has captured the entire production in powerfully present, tactile sound that really lets you hear down through the ensemble, from top to bottom. This really is an exceptional release. If you love this music, be sure to hear it.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; David Hurwitz)

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The Wooden Prince and The Miraculous Mandarin are – together with the earlier opera Bluebeard’s Castle – the only stage works by Béla Bartók. They stand apart from the more abstract and often more explicitly folk-related character of the music that we primarily associate with the composer. They are nevertheless major achievements that in different ways highlight Bartók’s imaginative use of the modern orchestra. Set in an enchanted forest, The Wooden Prince is based on a fairytale-like libretto featuring a prince and princess. The two are subjected to various trials, but at the end of the ballet they are allowed to come together and live – we assume – happily ever after. In stark contrast, The Miraculous Mandarin takes place in an urban brothel where three robbers force a girl to seduce men so that they can overpower and kill them. The subject-matter and the erotic qualities of much of the music caused a scandal at the première in 1926, and for a long time the score was primarily performed in the shorter concert version heard on the present release, the first from the team of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and Susanna Mälkki, the orchestra’s chief conductor since 2016.

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REVIEWS:

Mälkki elicits brilliant, rhythmically disciplined playing from the Helsinki Philharmonic; and although her depiction of urban din in the opening minutes lacks the raucous ferocity of Dorati’s justly famous mid-1950s account (and whose doesn’t?), her careful attention to dynamic gradations lays bare a wealth of textural and colouristic detail.

– Gramophone

Naturally, a complex score such as The Wooden Prince requires an orchestra capable of extreme virtuosity, and the Helsinki Philharmonic provide this to the full under their newly appointed principal conductor. She guides them in a performance of expressive sweep and, where required, tenderness. The SACD recording, as is so often the case with BIS, is state of the art.

Stylistically, The Miraculous Mandarin occupies a much harsher, at times grating sound world, there being no hint of the former's misty impressionism. In 1927, shortly after the sole Cologne performance, Bartók published an orchestral suite comprising the first six stages of the work, and that is what we have here. The orchestra respond here with considerable virtuosity under Susanna Mälkki’s direction, and the recording copes admirably with Bartok’s glaring, lurid orchestration of the dissonant music.

– MusicWeb International

This release grew out of the fascination of Robert von Bahr, founder and managing director of BIS Records, for the television series House of Cards. It wasn’t only – or even primarily – the script or the acting that grabbed him, however, but just as much the music. Said and done – Jeff Beal, the composer of the House of Cards soundtrack, was contacted and it was soon decided that he should compose a Flute Concerto for the virtuosic Sharon Bezaly. To complement the concerto a selection of music from the series was agreed upon, but with five seasons worth of installments to choose from, this quickly grew into a large-scale House of Cards Symphony which at 83 minutes takes up an album all on its own. So now the decision was made to record and present a lavish release, with three further works: Six Sixteen for guitar and orchestra (performed by Grammy winner Jason Vieaux), Canticle for strings and a brand new House of Cards Fantasy for flute and orchestra. The Norrköping Symphony Orchestra has received international acclaim for its recordings of the hyper-intense music of modernist Allan Pettersson, but here, under the direction of the composer himself, it has taken to the new idiom and welcomes the additional instruments necessary to bring out that House of Cards feeling: electric guitar and bass guitar, drum kit, piano and flugelhorn.

Praised for it's versatility and keen interest in new music, the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir and it's chief conductor Fredrik Malmberg present a programme devoted to a cappella works in a modern yet accessible style by American or American-born composers. The album opens with a triptych based of adaptations of ancient Gaelic poems, Reincarnations by Samuel Barber, known for his opulent, post-romantic language as expressed in his famous Adagio for Strings. Jeff Beal, one of Hollywood's most prolific and respected composers, wrote The Salvage Men, based on texts by Oscar Wilde and contemporary Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Kay Ryan. This cycle, according to Beal, offers 'a wholly fresh, contemporary view on the themes of transformation and our chosen response to pain'. Daniel Nelson's The New Colossus, based on a text by the 19th-century writer Emma Lazarus inspired by the Statue of Liberty, aims to convey musically the majesty and beauty inherent in the idea of inclusion. Finally, two works by Eric Whitacre, a composer whose works have become popular with vocal ensembles across America: A Boy and a Girl, a delicate piece based on a poem by Octavio Paz, and Three Songs of Faith, on texts by E.E. Cummings, a cycle that presents Whitacre's personal faith and his reflections on the spiritual and the unknowable.

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For their latest project on BIS, the Wigmore Soloists perform two works with unusual instrumentation: Beethoven’s and Berwald’s septets for violin, viola, cello, double bass, clarinet, bassoon and horn.

If the young Beethoven did not aspire to profundity in his own Septet, he nevertheless managed to create a fine balance between light-heartedness and substance. In the tradition of serenade, this work in six movements represents Beethoven at his most warmhearted and relaxed, yet his compositional craft and subtlety are typically sharp. As the septet achieved such fame during his lifetime, Beethoven eventually became irritated by its popularity, which he said overshadowed more mature works.

Best known for his symphonies, Swedish composer Franz Berwald also composed a septet that is in no way imitative of Beethoven’s. Berwald had his own voice and his own musical expression, and his artful handling of the wind instruments deserves praises. Thanks to its attractive transparency, Berwald’s Septet consistently exudes freshness thanks to its endearing musical humor and ranks as the finest of his chamber compositions.

REVIEW:

I know the Wigmore Soloists from their very fine 2021 recording of an undisputed masterpiece, Schubert’s Octet. Here they navigate the tricky line between popular and erudite music, and come up with the perfect compromise. Their Beethoven Septet is, quite properly, not treated as the Eroica, but neither is it tossed off with little regard for its true merits. The result is, I think, as fine a Beethoven Septet as I’ve heard.

Franz Berwald’s Septet seems like the perfect pairing for Beethoven’s Septet, since it was written in 1828, the year after Beethoven’s death. But this is, I believe, only the second time the two works have appeared together on one disc; the other was in a 2017 CD from the Uppsala Chamber Soloists. That was a well-played recording, especially the Berwald, but it’s completely outmatched by the new Wigmore Soloists disc. Everything about this new BIS recording is perfectly judged, from the splendid, authentic, joyful performance to the always impeccable BIS engineering, and the fine liner notes by Philip Borg-Wheeler. Very highly recommended.

-- Music for Several Instruments (Dean Frey)

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After two albums devoted to Italian music from the 17th and 18th centuries (BIS-2585 and BIS-2645), male soprano Nicolo Balducci now offers us a recital devoted to the greatest representatives of Viennese Classicism - Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven - in the company of the fortepianist Anna Paradiso, whom we recently heard in a recording devoted to the work of Caroline Ridderstolpe together with mezzo-soprano Kristina Hammarstrom (BIS-2675). The vocal compositions gathered here, which include such rarities as two songs in French by Beethoven, are performed by a male soprano - in many cases the first time they have been recorded by this voice type. This original approach by the two performers makes it possible 'to explore unusual nuances, both in the interpretation and in the "soundscape" of this music, and to find new angles of inspiration in our interpretations' (Balducci). The combination of high voice and fortepiano emphasises the link between sound and words, with a dimension closer to chamber music, inspired by the specific timbre of the instruments. 'One of the fascinating aspects of the pieces on this recording is the power of their rhetorical expression', writes Paradiso. Balducci and Paradiso invite us here to be entertained and moved and to discover 'glimpses of intimate connections and shared secrets'.

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Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.

Import Hybrid-SACD pressing.