Für D.a.f.

The box-set traces the history of Archiv from 1947, when the first recordings were made (Helmut Walcha playing Bach organ works), to a bonus CD featuring selections from the new 2013 albums mentioned above. A complete overview is appended. In between comes a sequence of albums several of which are new to CD from the great names of the label, from Walcha, Wenzinger and Safford Cape, through Karl Richter, Nikolas Harnoncourt and Sir Charles Mackerras…

Johann Sebastian Bach and the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin go back a long way together! This recording, made with the welcome participation of Isabelle Faust and Antoine Tamestit, follows the complete violin concertos (2019), which left a lasting impression. Returning regularly to the inexhaustible source of the Brandenburgs ever since a memorable first recording in the late 1990s, the Berlin musicians have achieved a sovereign mastery of what is not a single work, but six, which, under their fingers, are successive episodes of a piece of musical theatre in love with dance, transparent sound and freedom. An exhilarating experience!

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the  most famous son of the great Johann Sebastian, created his own individual style, in which freedom of expression was the keyword. This substantial collection of keyboard works, ‘Für Kenner und Liebhaber’ (for connoisseur and amateur) contains some of his most audacious compositions, in which frequent and abrupt mood changes, improvisatory and declamatory passages without bar lines and wildly digressing modulations are the stylistic landmarks.

During the 1720s and 1730s Telemann prepared and to a large extent oversaw the printing and publication of a wide diversity of compositions. Chamber cantatas, concertos, orchestral suites, solos, trios and quartets were all represented. The high-water mark of chamber music publications came in the late 1730s with the set of six Paris Quartets (1738) and the Essercizii Musici (c1739). While almost every one of the 24 pieces contained in the latter collection has been recorded in the past, this is the first time that they have been issued as a complete set on disc. There is not a weak composition among them and Read more Telemann’s collection deserves its place among the most accomplished chamber music anthologies of the late baroque.