Bach Koopman

Though only one cantata gets to bear the nickname, Bach actually wrote many works that could be described as wedding cantatas. Some of them are lost, others are of debatable authorship, but of those that remain, four are collected on this 2008 disc. The performances by Ton Koopman leading the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir are taken from their set of the complete extant cantatas with the four works here recorded in 1994, 1996, and 2002. Though Koopman has shown himself to be a master Bach conductor, one sometimes got the sense in listening to his sacred cantatas that the composer's Lutheran ethos sat less well with his naturally ebullient personality than did the far more cheerful secular cantatas.

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.”

...Ton Koopman is an exclusive artist of the Time-Warner organization for which he is recording the complete cycle of the sacred and secular Cantatas of J.S. Bach as well as the integral of the works for organ. The organ recordings have been completed in July 1999. The cantatas will be completed in 2004. In September 1997 Ton Koopman was rewarded the Deutsche Schallplattenpreis "Echo Klassik 1997" for the Bach Cantatas...

Ton Koopman (Conductor, Harpsichord, Organ) - Short Biography

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 present set is the debut of Ton Koopman on the Challenge Classics label and the re-start of the series of complete cantatas by Johann Sebastian Bach. Volume 13 in this CD presentation contains the third series of chorale cantatas from the second annual cycle Bach composed for Leipzig. Music criticism in the modern sense did not exist in the eighteenth century, so we do not really know anything about how the public responded to Bach's music. One of the few comments we have is in a newspaper report of Bach's first appearance in the capacity of Cantor of St Thomas's, presenting a cantata on 30 May 1723,but we learn only that it was received with approbation, even applause.

Bach composed in Leipzig the biggest part of his cantatas. A cantata is a composition in several parts for one or more voices and instruments, where arias, recitatives and chorusses alternate. Often these were preceded by an instrumental introduction, a sinfonia. In Bach's earliest cantatas these were also called concerto, sonata or sonatina. These instrumental works are collected on this album.

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.

In evaluating a Bach cantata recording, there are so many variables to consider--programming choices; quality and type of soloists; tempos and balances among soloists, orchestra, and chorus; quality of choir and orchestra; use of alternate arias (or voices for a particular aria); version of the score (where more than one exists); instrumentation (period or modern instruments; configuration of continuo); and of course, the quality of the recorded sound--that comparisons between different recordings often become more descriptions than critiques. No matter how "good" a performance is, if you don't like period instruments you won't like Herreweghe or Koopman; likewise, if a certain countertenor soloist bugs you, you'll be unlikely to enjoy a cantata in which that singer is prominently featured, no matter how wonderful the work's other movements sound. On the other hand, if you like Koopman - or Herreweghe, both of whom are the most interpretively consistent among period-instrument practitioners (Rilling fits that bill in the modern-instrument category; "periodists" Gardiner and Harnoncourt are notoriously unpredictable) - then you'll likely be pretty satisfied with most of their efforts in this repertoire...

David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Although Ton Koopman's fine Bach cantata series, begun in the mid-1990s, was abandoned by Warner Classics/Erato in 2001, the conductor managed to resume the 22-volume edition's issue through his own label, Antoine Marchand (a sub-label of Challenge Classics). And while distribution in the U.S. hasn't always been steady, that question seems to be resolved and we can expect to enjoy the remaining volumes as they appear over the next few years. This Volume 2 is by no means a "new release", but since Classicstoday.com last visited the series in June, 2003, with a review of Volume 1 (type Q6613 in Search Reviews), we thought we'd pick up where we left off. As collectors of these cantatas already know, Koopman initially released 12 of the 22 volumes with Erato, so if you already own any of these, you don't need to consider the Challenge Classics versions since they are identical...

–David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

The fifth volume of our complete recording of Bach’s cantatas completes the series of secular cantatas from the composer’s years in Leipzig. Seven works are involved here, spanning a period from 1725 to 1742, the year of Bach’s final secular cantata, BWV 212. Of Bach’s occasional compositions, some fifty secular pieces have survived, yet these represent no more than a fraction of what must once have existed. Indeed, there is no other group of works by the composer that has suffered such great – and regrettable – losses. In the case of more than half of the works that are known to have existed, only the words, but not the music, survived. Quite how many pieces may have disappeared without leaving any trace whatsoever is impossible to say.