Sings Bach & Handel By Maureen Forrester

This is a wonderful performance, certainly without the digital fidelity, given the record date (1969), but for the same reason, with the warmth that many miss in the digital coldness. But the greater excellence of this version lies in the marvelous and powerful female voices: Helen Watts (Dame of the British Empire), the African-Amerincan Reri Grist (Bohm choice for Mozart and Strauss), and above all the huge canadian contralto Maureen Forrester. Simply marvelous, for those that love real music.

Ever since the operas of Handel started to return to the stage in the 1920s, Giulio Cesare has been one of the pieces held in high regard. Always known by name through the most famous of Cleopatra’s arias (”V’adoro, pupille” and “Piangerò la sorte mia”) and often produced successfully in Germany, it has gathered a reputation as the best of the composer’s operas-the reasons for which can now be verified by anyone who acquires RCA Victor’s current release of the highly successful New York City Opera production.

Jochen Kowalski is one of the most charismatic and successful male altos of our time and has built up an unusually and wide-ranging and extensive repertoire. It is the dramatic quality of his voice which makes it special.

Schon bei seiner Gründung 1962 hatten es sich Collegium Aureum als Ziel gesetzt, alte Musik auf historischen Instrumenten aufzuführen. Während der langen Zeit seines Bestehens veröffentlichte das Ensemble zahlreiche erfolgreiche LPs und CDs und konzertierte in den großen Konzertsälen ganz Europas.

il Gardellino is a Flemish instrumental ensemble for Baroque music, founded in 1988 on an initiative of the Dutch oboist Marcel Ponseele (NL) and flutist Jan De Winne. The name was derived from a piece by Vivaldi for transverse flute, oboe, violin, bassoon and continuo Il Gardellino, which is in Flemish the name of the songbird distelvink. The ensemble plays on period instruments in historically informed performance. Works by Johann Sebastian Bach are a focus, but also by his contemporaries Johann Friedrich Fasch, Carl Heinrich Graun, Handel, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, Telemann and Vivaldi.

The solo boy soprano album has a kind of intensity, born of knowing that the sound will soon end, that attracts some and puts others off, but Norwegian treble Aksel Rykkvin, with flawless schoolboy good looks, has become something of a sensation with this album of Baroque and Classical arias. His voice has a rather metallic quality, and you might think that forcing it into these big arias would be an unnatural thing. Yet in fact some of these pieces, including the tough arias from Handel's Alcina, were originally written for a boy soprano, and Bach's church music made use of them as well. Rykkvin handles the acrobatics quite well.

Steven Isserlis and Richard Egarr here assemble all the viola da gamba sonatas written by three composers born in the propitious year of 1685: one each by Handel and Domenico Scarlatti, and three by JS Bach. Isserlis plays them on the gamba’s modern cousin, the cello, and the microphone loves his playing, picking up all the nuances and scampering asides from his soft-spoken instrument which can sometimes get lost in big concert halls. Egarr on harpsichord matches Isserlis’s eloquence and rambunctious energy all the way. The dreamy, airy slow movement of Bach’s Sonata in G minor brings telling use of vibrato as Isserlis circles around Egarr, his playing at once idiomatic and soulful. An extra cellist reinforces the bass line in the Handel and Scarlatti, in which the composers give the harpsichordist only a framework; Egarr’s imaginative realisations ensure that even when Scarlatti is at his most repetitive, he is never dull.

On his third PENTATONE album Time Traveler’s Suite, pianist Inon Barnatan redefines our notions of the suite by taking us on a journey through time and space, from Baroque pieces by Bach, Handel, Rameau and Couperin to more recent works by Ravel, Barber, Adès and Ligeti. The program culminates in Brahms’s ingenious Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel.

This Sony-made 30CD classical music collection covers almost all classical music, from the early Baroque period represented by Bach to the schools of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms represent romantic, national and even modern musical schools led by Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, etc. representative, everything wonderful and vivid.

This record is about reparation. History has not let two extraordinary composers meet each other. Georg Friedrich Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach came to the world in 1785, one month apart. Twice they failed to meet each other and never again would their life paths cross, instead following parallel ways. This album is dedicated to this failure.