Bach: Johann Sebastian Bach

András Schiff is one of the best Bach players among Gould, Rosalyn Tureck and Wanda Landowska. On Schiff's French Suites, every part from every suite has a different color and gives you different feeling. Every harmony is taken to its end with care, and dynamic balance is always delightful to listen. Articulation of the notes is excellent, full of humour, and in some places you surely start to smile and you feel very happy when you listen to Schiff. He also plays the slow parts very deeply and warmly, which is for some artists a big problem when playing Bach. There are also Italian Concerto and French Overture on the CD's, played brilliantly, so this set is really worth buying. Recommended for everyone.

La Stravaganza, under their director/harpsichordist Siegbert Rampe, are a Hamburg-based ensemble. Their performances of the six Brandenburg Concertos, together with the Triple Concerto in A minor (BWV 1 044), and a version of the Fifth Brandenburg which predates by about three years Bach's presentation copy to the Margrave, provide stimulating and mainly satisfying listening. It is perhaps a pity that the earlier version of the First Concerto was omitted from the recording, since it reveals significant textual variants from the Brandenburg, above all the scoring of the second of the two Trios.

Old technology meets modern technology on this release from Germany's Oehms label, a top-notch Bach organ recording equally worth the consideration of the first-timer or those with large Bach collections. Featured is one of the monuments of central German organ-building, the Silbermann Organ at the Catholic Hofkirche in Dresden. The organ was dismantled during World War II but subsequently rebuilt and later thoroughly restored. It's a magnificent beast, with plenty of power and some unusual, highly evocative tone colors in the quieter registrations.

This recording by Trevor Pinnock is one of the finest ever. Played on original baroque instruments, the sound is a little thinner than what we are used to with modern orchestras. This is not a fault - it is actually an advantage. It brings Bach to life - every instrument is heard clearly, the feel is gutsy, real, lively. This is the Brandenburgs as Bach himself would have heard it. Wonderful stuff.

Sometimes, dreams come true. For Francesco Tristano, the dream was twofold: first a desire to project his art in the future by devoting himself to one of the most incontestably timeless figures in the history of music, Johann Sebastian Bach. This profound desire fuelled the creation of intothefuture, Francesco Tristano’s very personal line of recordings, where sounds morph into an abstract and subtly poetic photographic imagery, which is found in the booklets. This first of these recordings, dedicated to the six Partitas (BWV 825 to BWV 830) is a perfect illustration of this concept.

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.

What you will find on this disc is A) contrapunctus I-IX played on two different organs in 1962; B) contrapunctus I II & IV from a1981 TV broadcast; C) contrapunctus IX XI & XIII in mono from a radio broadcast in 1967; D) the unfinished contrapunctus XIV from what may or may not be the same TV broadcast as B); and as a final filler E) a prelude and fugue on the name BACH from a studio recording in 1980. Items B)-E) are given on the piano.

In the '80s there were those listeners who thought that Heinrich Schiff might redeem cello performance practice from fatal beauty and lethal elegance. Aside from the burly and brawny Rostropovich, more and more cellists were advocating a performance style whose ideals were perfect intonation and graceful phrasing. In some repertoire, say, Fauré, these are perfectly legitimate goals. In other repertoire, Beethoven and Brahms, say, it is a terrible mistake. In Bach's Cello Suites, as the fay and fragile Yo-Yo Ma recordings make clear, it was a terminal mistake. Not so in Schiff's magnificently muscular 1984 recordings of the suites: Schiff's rhythms, his tempos, his tone, his intonation, and especially his interpretations were anything but fay or fragile. In Schiff's performance, Bach's Cello Suites are not the neurasthenic music of a composer supine with dread and despair in the dark midnight of the soul, but the forceful music of a mature composer in full control of himself and his music.

It was in 1985 that Philippe Herreweghe made his first recording of the St. Matthew Passion, following a public performance that created a deep impression. Thirty years later, this trailblazing interpretation is still among the top recommendations.