Bach Koopman

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the Baroque period. He is known for instrumental compositions such as the Brandenburg Concertos and the Goldberg Variations, and for vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach Revival, he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers of all time.

A transformative force in historically informed performance, Ton Koopman is renowned as a conductor, harpsichordist and organist. In 1979, aged 35, he founded the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra in the city where he had studied with the great Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt. Drawing on an international pool of players, the ensemble soon gained a reputation for flexibility, colour and expressivity as it explored the music of such composers as the Bach family, Handel, Telemann and Buxtehude.

Ton Koopman is considered to be one of the world's leading experts in the performance of music of the baroque period and particularly that of J.S. Bach. As a harpsichord player and director of the group he founded, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir, Ton Koopman has been a regular guest at leading concert halls in Vienna, London, Berlin, Brussels, Madrid, Rome, Salzburg, Tokyo and Osaka. Between 1994 and 2004 he conducted and recorded all the existing cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, and this series received many international awards, among them the BBC Music Magazine Award in 2008.

The present album collects a representative cross section of Bach’s Latin church music that complements his extensive and rich repertoire of cantatas for the Sundays and feast days of the ecclesiastical year, works which Ton Koopman has already recorded with great success for Challenge Classics. It covers a broad chronological range from Bach’s time as cantor and music director in Leipzig, and includes the Magnificat from 1723, the Sanctus from 1724, the four Kyrie-Gloria Masses from the later 1730s, and the Christmas Gloria from the mid 1740s.

This is vintage, classic Koopman: Tempi that never linger, orchestral textures that accord privilege to clarity and insight over effect and superb, beautifully articulated, solo vocal lines. Koopman's lucidity might appear a little too detached or cool for some listeners who are used to responding to the emotional charge of Bach's Passions. One of Koopman's greatest strengths is his grasp of architecture: of the unfolding of the passion events; of the relative roles and interactions of the soloists and 'crowds'; of the inevitability of events in a musical - as opposed to a Biblical - sense.

The marvellous Ton Koopman plays Bach's complete works for organ in wonderful performances full of power, passion, and grace! These digital recordings were made in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, and 1999.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, as part of his regular duties as kapellmeister in Hamburg, composed 19 passion settings, alternating the four Gospel texts so that a new setting of a given text appeared once every four years, as his predecessor Georg Philipp Telemann had done. Until the discovery of the Berlin Sing-Akademie collection in Kiev in 1999, all that remained of this considerable body of work were bits and fragments of individual pieces, most of them extant because they were used in other contexts.

This twenty-second and last volume of cantata recordings contains two of Bach's latest cantatas (BWV 30 and 80), including the secular model for BWV 30 and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's arrangement of two movements from BWV 80 dating from after 1750. Also included are the four Kyrie-Gloria masses of the late 1730s; they are very closely associated with the cantata repertoire of the 1720s. These masses are based on selected movements of cantatas dating from the period 1723-6; after an interval of ten or so years Bach reworked them, in most cases very thoroughly. Renowned Bach specialist Ton Koopman (1944) was awarded the 2006 Bach Medal by the city of Leipzig 05 Jun 2006, the final day of this year's annual Leipzig Bach Festival.

When this recording was released in 1996, the words most often used to describe it were "luminous" and "radiant." The adjectives fit: the choir and orchestra have a glowing sound that makes the chorales in particular wondrous to hear. The most extroverted choruses and arias lack the extra measure of vigorous excitement of John Eliot Gardiner's performance, but Koopman's tender approach is beguiling. What's more, his male soloists are marvelous: bass Klaus Mertens is sensitive and energetic in equal measure; Christoph Prégardien manages the fearsome tenor arias easily and his singing of the Evangelist's recitatives strikes a fine balance between vocalism and narration. Lisa Larsson's soprano and Elisabeth von Magnus's contralto have a purity suggestive of the teenage boys for whom Bach wrote (though one sometimes hears a youthful fragility in the voices as well).