Bach, Viola

That said, Anner Bylsma's disc gets a great deal more playing time. The timbre of the piccolo cello is ideally matched with the organ. While purists may balk at such unusual instrumentation, I cannot help but think such an experiment is quite in keeping with the spirit of Baroque era practices. In general, I try not to judge the success of a recording by a preconceived idea of what a musical elite would or would not approve of.

Bach's sonatas for viola da gamba and keyboard, BWV 1027-1029, were partly adapted for other works, and there's nothing outrageous in itself about playing them on a cello. Indeed, the gamba was a fairly old-fashioned instrument by Bach's time, and the present performance may well be historically authentic, as the booklet contends. German cellist Nicolas Altstaedt tones down his instrument, so to speak, by using a low tuning intended to reproduce the gamba's more intimate quality. Nevertheless, this is an unusual reading, one that makes the music much darker and more dramatic than it usually is, or, perhaps, was intended to be.

Melodiya presents an unusual interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord. Written during the Cöthen period (1717-23), the sonatas, along with the solo suites for cello, violin and harpsichord, are the highest chamber instrumental accomplishments of the great German master. Today they belong to the golden repertoire of cello music, although at times they are played on other stringed instruments.

The first thing to strike the listener about these 2006 Avie recordings of Bach's Sonata for viola da gamba and harpsichord will be how loud they are. While neither instrument is noted for its power to project, the instruments are recorded so closely here as to be gargantuan in these recordings by Jonathan Manson and Trevor Pinnock. After adjusting the volume, the second thing to strike the listener will be how brilliantly played they are.

That said, Anner Bylsma's disc gets a great deal more playing time. The timbre of the piccolo cello is ideally matched with the organ. While purists may balk at such unusual instrumentation, I cannot help but think such an experiment is quite in keeping with the spirit of Baroque era practices. In general, I try not to judge the success of a recording by a preconceived idea of what a musical elite would or would not approve of.

This album is a story of family and friendship. Positioned between homage to a father figure and modernity, the viola da gamba sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach are a revealing element in the history of the Bach family and its ties of friendship with two families of virtuoso instrumentalists, the Abels and the Hesses, who had already inspired the work of Johann Sebastian.

Steven Isserlis and Richard Egarr here assemble all the viola da gamba sonatas written by three composers born in the propitious year of 1685: one each by Handel and Domenico Scarlatti, and three by JS Bach. Isserlis plays them on the gamba’s modern cousin, the cello, and the microphone loves his playing, picking up all the nuances and scampering asides from his soft-spoken instrument which can sometimes get lost in big concert halls. Egarr on harpsichord matches Isserlis’s eloquence and rambunctious energy all the way. The dreamy, airy slow movement of Bach’s Sonata in G minor brings telling use of vibrato as Isserlis circles around Egarr, his playing at once idiomatic and soulful. An extra cellist reinforces the bass line in the Handel and Scarlatti, in which the composers give the harpsichordist only a framework; Egarr’s imaginative realisations ensure that even when Scarlatti is at his most repetitive, he is never dull.

In 1764 a couple of German musicians lodged together in London. They shared a sort of common background, for one was the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, newly arrived in town to write opera, and the other, Carl Friedrich Abel, had been Bach’s student back in Leipzig more than a decade earlier. He was in town to make his living as a composer of instrumental works and as a performer on that now-anachronistic instrument the viola da gamba. The two apparently hit it off quite well, for they soon conspired to develop the famed Bach-Abel concert series that became a fixture in the city for more than a decade and a half. Given that they also contrived to perform as well, it is not surprising that both men created a wide variety of works for their instruments, Bach on the keyboard and Abel on his gamba.

Norwegian folk musician Sinikka Langeland, singer and player of the kantele (the Finnish table harp) is a distinctly non-traditional traditionalist, redefining "folk" in successive projects. 'Maria's Song' finds her in the company of two distinguished classical musicians - organist Kare Nordstoga and "giant of the Nordic viola" Lars Anders Tomter - and on a mission to restore Marian texts to sacred music, weaving folk melodies in between the timeless strains of J S Bach. Langeland made a lot of friends with her sparkling ECM debut Starflowers: "There are jewels everywhere on this arresting example of ego-free music-making. One of the albums of this or any other year" raved the Irish Times. Where Starflowers brought Langeland into the orbit of jazz improvisers, Maria's Song is a meeting and cross referencing of folk and 'classical' energies, and also a righting of historical 'injustice': Religious folk songs are amongst the most distinctive elements of the Norwegian folk tradition, yet the Virgin Mary rarely appears in them.

Originally released in 2001 but unavailable for almost two years, Glossa has designed gorgeous new packaging for this most important of Paolo Pandolfo’s projects, possibly a milestone in the recording history of Bach’s music. Everybody seems to know these discs – despite almost no marketing effort, they are perceived with such benchmarks as Glenn Gould’s or Gustav Leonhardt’s renderings of the GoldbergVariations or Anner Bylsma’s performances of the original cello suites.