Richter Bach

This box set gathers together Karl Richter's stereo recordings of Bach's choral works that were recorded between 1959-1969. Missing is his final, digital St Matt, the 1961 Mass in B Minor (the 1969 "from Japan" recording is included) and an earlier mono Christmas Oratorio (available on Teldec CDs).

It would be impossible to say enough good about this two-disc set of Sviatoslav Richter playing Bach. Coupling three English suites and three French suites plus a pair of toccatas and a fantasia in live recordings from 1991 and 1992, Richter gives every movement, line, rhythm, and note its own weight and character, but also conveys every detail's critical function in the work as a whole. One could, for instance, characterize his E flat major French Suite as serene, his F major English Suite as playful, or his D minor Toccata as thoughtful, but doing so would not fully capture Richter's fusion of individuality and inevitability.

Stradivarius' 1991 studio and live digital recordings of Sviatoslav Richter are now brought together for a new definitive mid-price luxurious digipak box. Sviatoslav Richter is widely regarded as one of the finest pianists of the 20th century.With a career that began in Soviet Russia in the 1930s, listeners in the West had their first opportunity to hear him through recordings made in the 1950s, and his reputation among classical fans grew quickly. Richter's approach to music is best illustrated by the enormous range of his repertoire. In recital and on recordings he played everything from Bach to Stravinsky to George Gershwin as well as championing unknown or unpopular works he thought deserved the public's attention.

The Christmas Oratorio (German: Weihnachts-Oratorium), BWV 248, is an oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach intended for performance in church during the Christmas season. It was written for the Christmas season of 1734 and incorporates music from earlier compositions, including three secular cantatas written during 1733 and 1734 and a now lost church cantata, BWV 248a. The date is confirmed in Bach's autograph manuscript. The next performance was not until 17 December 1857 by the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin under Eduard Grell. The Christmas Oratorio is a particularly sophisticated example of parody music. The author of the text is unknown, although a likely collaborator was Christian Friedrich Henrici (Picander).

Karl Richter's Bach performances, although they represented a departure from the over-romanticized treatments of Baroque music that had prevailed up to his time, were not the kind of trailblazing return-to-authenticity projects of Trevor Pinnock, Christopher Hogwood, and others, whose early-music-performance practices continue to be the standard today.