Bach Harpsichord Koopman

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.

For a long time Baroque and Bach specialst Koopman wanted to record this masterpieces of Bach and now was the time to do it! Recorded in the trusted and beautiful-sounding Walloon Church in Amsterdam. My recording of Bach’s harpsichord partitas was a long time in coming. The main reason was a lack of time (recording Bach’s complete organ works, complete cantatas and Dieterich Buxtehude’s Opera Omnia required much time and attention). Another factor was my respect for these masterpieces by Bach – they are not something to just fit in between other projects. I already had plans to record them in the 1990s, for Erato, and now that I finally am able to, it is for my own label.

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.

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 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.”

The world-renowned early music specialist and keyboard player Ton Koopman and the violinist Catherine Manson perform the six Sonatas for Harpsichord and Violin, BWV 1014-1019 of Johann Sebastian Bach on this new 2-CD set for Challenge Classics. Their previous collaboration on the label was an outstanding recording of the music of Buxtehude. Catherine Manson enjoys a versatile performing career specialising in period performance as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral leader. She became the current leader of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra in 2006, and as first violinist of the London Haydn Quartet has been involved in a critically acclaimed series of recordings of the Haydn quartets for Hyperion.

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.

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.