Johann Sebastian Bach Brandenburg

Hermann Scherchen's performances of these Brandenburg Concerts avoids the normally expected exaltation of opening and closing movements conferred by most performances. Instead, he opts for a beautifully serene approach to the score, making it more reflective, thoughtful and expansive, hightlighting the lyrical flow that emanates from it.

The Complete works of J.S. Bach on 160 CDs at a super bargain price. The CDs are packaged in paper sleeves in a glossy cardboard box, and the notes and text are included as PDF files on an additional CD Rom disc. Almost entirely original instrument performances, all 60 hours of the Sacred Cantatas are new recordings for this edition (a story in itself), the first complete set of digital recordings in fact.

Hermann Scherchen's performances of these Brandenburg Concerts avoids the normally expected exaltation of opening and closing movements conferred by most performances. Instead, he opts for a beautifully serene approach to the score, making it more reflective, thoughtful and expansive, hightlighting the lyrical flow that emanates from it.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most prolific composers in the history of music – also literally, with his twenty children, but mainly in terms of his exceptional output. In spite of this, those of his works which appeared in print during his lifetime are less numerous than the proverbial tip of the iceberg. This does not imply that his music did not circulate: indeed, at his time, the favourite means of dissemination of musical works was through manuscript copies. Printing was reserved for works which were considered as particularly meaningful, and which represented the composer at his or her best; for works which had, therefore, also a “promotional” dimension, and which could foster the composer’s career by obtaining him or her fame, reputation, and possibly also a prestigious post.

This disc contains some sonatas for wind instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach from his years in Weimar (1708-17) and Cöthen (1717-23), having in common – as they have come down to us or as several musicologists have proposed – their being intended for the recorder and/or the oboe. The interchangeability of instrumentation, linked to different creative periods, to practical contingencies, and to the inexhaustible desire for perfection that induced the genius of Eisenach, according to the testimony of his earliest biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, to continually revise his own works, often makes it difficult to go beyond their sterile catalogue dates in tracing their evolution. For this reason an experimental approach was chosen here, to bring back to their presumably original state what today is a handful of works, which were part of a much larger repertory. Chamber music was becoming the composer’s principal occupation in the time period under consideration, which was decisive in the progress of Bach’s career from organist to Konzertmeister (1714) and then to Kapellmeister of a Calvinist court (1717) essentially devoted to the cultivation of secular music.