24 Giờ Sinh Tồn

Whilst Handel was renowned in his lifetime as a virtuoso organist, his art was based on improvisation. He left no developed oeuvre of keyboard pieces which would give us an idea of his full capabilities as an organist. His organ concertos are actually theatre pieces, developed by Handel to support his oratorio performances. Handel brought in an organ to act as continuo in the choruses and developed the idea of an organ concerto as a way of adding extra novelty. At the oratorios, the audience could not rely on novelty and virtuoso display from the latest Italian singers so Handel’s performances on the organ were a sort of substitute.

Ton Koopman is not only one of the great fathers of the Baroque-Renaissance revival in the 1970’s, but a true pioneer of our time. After completing the Bach Cantatas survey, was he awarded the Bach Prize 2014 by the Royal Academy of Music. The prize is awarded to outstanding individuals in the performance and scholarship of Bach’s music and none could be more worthy than Koopman, who has been noted as doing ”remarkable work promoting Bach’s music in the last thirty or so years.”

This seventh volume of the complete cantatas is exclusively given over to works from the first cycle of Leipzig cantatas of 1723/24. When Bach became Thomaskantor in Leipzig, he knew that he was taking on a post that was one of the richest in tradition and most important in the sphere of church music in Protestant Germany. From the latter part of the 17th century on, the cantata came to replace the Gospel motet, which had been used in church services in Protestant Germany since the time of the Reformation to underline the content of the prescribed reading from the Gospel.

Between 1999 and 2004 conductor, musicologist, organist and harpsichordist, Ton Koopman recorded the complete cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir, which he founded in 1979. This 2-CD volume contains a selection of Highlights from the award winning 22-volume series of the Complete Cantatas. The inlay contains an additional listing of all cantatas in order of BWV-numbers, referring to the volumes of the complete series. The soloists featured are sopranos Sandrine Piau, Elisabeth von Magnus, Johannette Zomer, Lisa Larsson, and Anne Grimm; altos Bogna Bartosz and Annette Markert; Tenors Christoph Prégardien and Paul Agnew; and Bass Klauss Mertens.

The 18th set of Bach's cantatas contains exclusively works of the third yearly cycle from Leipzig. Unlike the first two Leipzig yearly cycles, this one extends over a longer period: from June 1725 until 1727. The works in this set belong essentially to the years 1725-26 and are in some cases chronologically contiguous (BWV 187 and 45; BWV 98, 55, 52), with the result that the original sequence can be easily grasped.

The ninth volume of this complete recording of Bach’s cantatas continues the series of cantatas from the first Leipzig cycle. Cantata 173a is the sole exception: a secular cantata composed by Bach at Cöthen, it was reworked as a church cantata (BWV 173) for the first Leipzig cycle and is included in Volume 7 (CD 3). BWV 66 is also based on an original work from Bach’s Cöthen period.