Bach Sous Les Tilleuls

Entering the Café Zimmermann in Leipzig in the 1730s, it was not uncommon to be able to attend concerts organized by the famous Johann Sebastian Bach surrounded by his sons and friends. On the menu: coffee, liqueurs and pastries, sonatas and concerti! During the summer, escaping the heat, amateurs and virtuosos gathered in the gardens of the Porte de Grimma to enjoy the mildness of the evening. By offering new transcriptions for two harpsichords of concertos by Bach and Vivaldi, Loris Barrucand and Clément Geoffroy invite us to renew our view of this music which is by turns scholarly and flamboyant. Under the lime trees of Leipzig, a cup of coffee in hand, the great Bach awaits you!

Entering the Café Zimmermann in Leipzig in the 1730s, it was not uncommon to be able to attend concerts organized by the famous Johann Sebastian Bach surrounded by his sons and friends. On the menu: coffee, liqueurs and pastries, sonatas and concerti! During the summer, escaping the heat, amateurs and virtuosos gathered in the gardens of the Porte de Grimma to enjoy the mildness of the evening. By offering new transcriptions for two harpsichords of concertos by Bach and Vivaldi, Loris Barrucand and Clément Geoffroy invite us to renew our view of this music which is by turns scholarly and flamboyant. Under the lime trees of Leipzig, a cup of coffee in hand, the great Bach awaits you!

Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960) was a Greek conductor who came to America in the 1930s and made many recordings with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Like Wilhelm Furtwangler of Arturo Toscanini, Mitropoulos' height of popularity came just before the advent of modern sound technology, so that many of Mitropoulos' finest recordings are marred by distortion and background noises that may make those recordings practically un-listenable to some classical music enthusiasts (although the new Sony Mitropoulos set has advertised that most of those very rough recordings have been "remastered").

André Cluytens, though born in Belgium, achieved fame as one of the supreme French conductors of his era, renowned for his refinement and the sheer joy of his music-making. In the mid-20th century he built a substantial, varied and distinguished discography and became the first conductor to record the complete Beethoven symphonies with the Berliner Philharmoniker. This 64-disc set, uniting all his recordings of orchestral, concerto and choral repertoire, embraces the mainstream and the esoteric, and includes numerous items making their debut on CD or retrieved from the archives and released for the very first time.