爱而为一 S.h.e

The Baroque dream team of Rachel Podger and Kristian Bezuidenhout interpret the astonishing music of C.P.E. Bach’s Violin Sonatas in C Minor, B Minor, D Major and G Minor. The two early sonatas here from the 1730s resemble the older style of his father. Listening to these works, you can imagine J.S. Bach glancing over Emanuel's shoulders while he wrote them as a teenager at home in Leipzig. The later sonatas, written 30 to 50 years later, reveal an emancipated composer whose developed musical language embodies the 'Empfindsamer Stil', the directly emotional and rhetorical style characteristic of northern-german music of the time.

Johann Sebastian Bach - Sigiswald Kuijken - Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin
2xCD | EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 717 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Deutsche Harmonia Mundi # GD 77043 | Country/Year: Germany 1988, 1981
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque

Sigiswald Kuijken has been a pioneer in performing and teaching Baroque violin technique. He and his brothers were all exposed to early instruments as youngsters. Sigiswald and Wieland intuitively taught themselves how to play the viola da gamba. Sigiswald studied violin at the conservatory in Bruges, then in Brussels with Maurice Raskin, earning his degree in 1964. After doing his own research into Baroque performance practice, Kuijken began playing Baroque works on the violin without using a chinrest or shoulder rest and, in fact, not using his chin at all to hold the instrument…

This new album rounds off the complete recording of the symphonies of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach that the musicians of the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin began over two decades ago. The final batch offers the quintessence of his art, revealing the full originality of Johann Sebastian’s inspired son, whose freedom and inventiveness paved the way for Haydn and Mozart.

Radical, daring and extremely refined: that’s how Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach saw his new path for the Oratorio, after his father’s Passions had marked the climax of the baroque era. Encouraged by his godfather Telemann and liberated from the yoke of the capricious Frederick of Prussia, he found himself in Hamburg with an audience hungry for new music. And he brought them his oratorios, no longer in churches but in concert halls, where he demanded the listener’s undivided attention for sudden changes of mood and colour.

Brahms had already decided to retire as a composer when, on a journey to Meiningen in 1891, he was inspired and challenged by clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld’s beautiful playing. The two Sonatas, Op. 120 are part of a late flowering that resulted in some of Brahms’s finest chamber music. Brahms himself explored these pieces beyond the clarinet, and Karl-Heinz Schütz’s arrangements are based on the composer’s own alternative versions, seeking out the ideal of two equally matched instruments in constant dialogue. Also included is a selection of ‘songs without words’, further expanding the flute repertoire with arrangements of these much-loved Lieder.

C.P.E. Bach would undoubtedly rejoice, were he alive, upon hearing this album of his cello concertos by Truls Mørk and Les Violons du Roy under the direction of Bernard Labadie. From the opening notes, one cannot help but feel the orchestra is fantastic. The A major Cello Concerto begins with vigor and liveliness, with the ensemble playing perfectly together in tempo with great spirit. Mørk plays just as well, with a clean, accurate, and somewhat light touch.