Cyclo Tôn Thât Tiêt

2019 – An Anniversary Year. For three exceptional musicians 2019 brings cause for great joy and gratitude for several reasons. Ton Koopman, internationally renowned as a harpsichordist, organist, conductor, professor and musicologist, celebrates his 75th birthday.

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.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, as part of his regular duties as kapellmeister in Hamburg, composed 19 passion settings, alternating the four Gospel texts so that a new setting of a given text appeared once every four years, as his predecessor Georg Philipp Telemann had done. Until the discovery of the Berlin Sing-Akademie collection in Kiev in 1999, all that remained of this considerable body of work were bits and fragments of individual pieces, most of them extant because they were used in other contexts.

Under the Antoine Marchand (that's Ton Koopman in French, or Anthony Merchant in English) imprint of the Challenge Classics label, Dutch early music veteran Ton Koopman recording the large corpus of surviving works by Dietrich Buxtehude, inspired by the tercentary of the composer's death in 1707. All initial indications are that few other musicians could have done this at all, and probably no one could have done it as well.

Danish-German composer Dietrich Buxtehude has an extensive output of vocal music in addition to his far better known canon of organ music. The vocal music is more obscure in that it is such a mixed bag. The oratorios he wrote have gone lost, many pieces relate directly to the organ music in a way that is difficult to divine now and some of the sacred concertos he composed are less than compelling, written for afternoon lunch concerts and not meant as "serious" music.

Ton Steine Scherben - Land In Sicht: Live in Offenbach 1983
Full DVD: 7,86 GB | FLAC @ 16/48: 886 MB | Full Artwork, No LOG (DVD Rip) | 5% Recovery Info + Rev-Part
Label/Cat#: eyetune etp 4001 5 | Country/Year: Germany 2002
Genre: Rock | Style: Krautrock, Politrock

Ton Steine Scherben was one of the first and most influential German language rock bands of the 1970s and early 1980s. Well known for the highly political and emotional lyrics of vocalist Rio Reiser, they became a musical mouthpiece of new left movements, such as the squatting movement, during that time in Germany and their hometown of West Berlin in particular. Today, after the band's demise in 1985, and the death of Rio Reiser in 1996, Ton Steine Scherben have remained a cult following and popularity in the related scenes. Recently, some of the remaining members have given reunion concerts under the name "Ton Steine Scherben Family".

There are people who buy everything Yo-Yo Ma releases, and that's a good thing: his incessant musical curiosity and his ability to carry his audience with him constitute a true bright spot in today's classical music scene. Fans of the two Simply Baroque discs Ma recorded with Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra will find much to like in Vivaldi's Cello, featuring the same musicians and offering several Vivaldi cello concertos plus Vivaldi works arranged for cello and ensemble by Koopman.

This is vintage, classic Koopman: Tempi that never linger, orchestral textures that accord privilege to clarity and insight over effect and superb, beautifully articulated, solo vocal lines. Koopman's lucidity might appear a little too detached or cool for some listeners who are used to responding to the emotional charge of Bach's Passions. One of Koopman's greatest strengths is his grasp of architecture: of the unfolding of the passion events; of the relative roles and interactions of the soloists and 'crowds'; of the inevitability of events in a musical - as opposed to a Biblical - sense.