Bach Koopman

Masaaki Suzuki was better known as a keyboard player in the first decade or so of his career, but since about 1990 has established himself as one of the leading conductors of Baroque choral music. Suzuki was born in Kobe, Japan, on April 29, 1954. As a child he exhibited musical talent early on and by age 12 was a church organist. He later enrolled at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he studied composition and organ.

Ton Koopman, great Dutch organist and harpsichordist sublimating the baroque scene for five decades, here delivers us an overview of the Great Organ (Robert Cliquot/ Julien Tribuot, 1710) of the Royal Chapel of Versailles, inaugurating our collection "L'Вge d'Or de l'Orgue Franзais" (the Golden Age of French Organ). An anthology of the possibilities of this purely "French style" instrument, here are the two great Suites of Clйrambaut, published the same year as the inauguration of the instrument, majestic pieces of Louis and Franзois Couperin, masters of colors, of Daquin's Christmas Music full of sap, and even a Bach Choral! A Master Organist makes a resounding tribute to the symbolic instrument wanted for his Chapel by Louis XIV.

Johann Sebastian Bach - Weltliche Kantaten BWV 208, 215
Monika Frimmer, Lynne Dawson / Orchestra and Choir of the Age of Enlightenment - Gustav Leonhardt
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 330 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Philips # 454 467-2 | Country/Year: Germany 1998
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque, Vocal, Secular

…Leonhardts first public performance took place in 1950, when he performed J.S. Bach's The Art of the Fugue for a Viennese audience. This marked the beginning of a legendary and influential career that would take him to performance venues all over the world, setting stylistic and interpretive standards for keyboard music dating from the early 1500s to the late 1700s. His treatment of the works of Couperin, Froberger, and Frescobaldi were pivotal in affecting a shift in Baroque performance practice from the motoric to the malleable…

Johann Sebastian Bach - Weltliche Kantaten BWV 205, 214
René Jacobs, Christoph Prégardien / Orchestra and Choir of the Age of Enlightenment - Gustav Leonhardt
EAC+LOG+CUE | FLAC: 332 MB | Artwork | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Philips # 432 161-2 | Country/Year: Germany 1992
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque, Vocal, Secular

…Leonhardts first public performance took place in 1950, when he performed J.S. Bach's The Art of the Fugue for a Viennese audience. This marked the beginning of a legendary and influential career that would take him to performance venues all over the world, setting stylistic and interpretive standards for keyboard music dating from the early 1500s to the late 1700s. His treatment of the works of Couperin, Froberger, and Frescobaldi were pivotal in affecting a shift in Baroque performance practice from the motoric to the malleable…

The pandemic in 2020-21 brought little to dispel the gloom among performing musicians. But these months also proved to be a time of reflection and artistic rebirth for many, the arts became a breeding ground for spiritual offspring, and so it proved for me; the genesis of the work you can hear on this album. Finally, there was plenty of time to spend many hours every day working on the project against a background of calm, which made Bach's music all the more comforting!

Helmuth Rilling’s unabated desire to record and re-record Bach is clearly endemic in his profound identification with a choral oeuvre of which he is, arguably, the world’s most experienced living exponent. Geschwinde, ihr wirbelnden Winde (better known as “The Contest between Phoebus and Pan”) is a colourful setting of Picander’s tame libretto of Phoebus’s whitewashing of Pan’s musical credentials, a Meistersinger scenario spiced up with a subtext on the increasing banality of musical tastes c1730: “inflated heat but little ballast”, as Mercury has it. This recording contains many Rilling attributes, old and new; most strikingly, to his credit, there is no letting up in the adrenalin level as he gets older, as there clearly was with his late compatriot, Karl Richter.