Bach Mit Fried Und Freud

This 1990 Digital Recording is a must for Bach's CD Collector. Recorded using historic organs on which some were played himself by Bach. Marie-Claire Alain's playing here is more in historic and faithful to performance practice. The tempos and the registrations are well planned and the approach of playing is spontaneous and simple. The spirituality of the performer is so evident here.

This set gathers the Bach recordings released by Michel Chapuis for the French label Valois (now Naive) between 1966 and 1970. These highly regarded recordings were reissued by Naive in 1999 and soon became unavailable again. Faultless registration, dramatic flair, dazzling technique and pinpoint clarity in counterpoint make these recordings a cornerstone of any Bach and organ discography. The booklet includes a detailed index by BWV numbers and another by alphabetical order of titles.

Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt were at the forefront of the early music movement that swept classical music in the '70s and '80s, performing pieces from the canon with period instruments in order to re-create the original intent of the composer as closely as possible. And their most enduring legacy is right here, the complete survey of Bach's sacred cantatas that they began in 1971 and completed in 1988.

On Musikalische Exequien (Musical Exhibitions) featuring Concentus Konig, you will find a dialog between two of the most essential funerary musical works of the German Baroque.

Organist Stephen Farr continues his survey of works by Johann Sebastian Bach with one of the composer’s major collections of organ chorale preludes – the Orgelbüchlein. This unfinished compendium of miniatures, said by Mendelssohn to bear ‘most evidently the marks of his genius’, contains much variety with each of theforty-six completed works containing a well-defined and individual character. For this recording, Farr performs on the eighteenth-century Trost organ of Waltershausen’s stunning Stadtkirche in Germany.