The New Bach Reader

This Da Vinci Classics album explores two crucial aspects of Bach’s output and of his style. On the one hand, there is the “Italianness” of his music; on the other, the pedagogical dimension.

A selection of works by the greatest harpsichord composer of all — François Couperin, and from contemporary British composer Graham Lynch, who is a very worthy successor with music that is expressive, descriptive, deep and exceptionally rich, showing that the harpsichord is capable of real expression. The Lynch pieces are receiving their first recordings. Established virtuoso Assi Karttunen is from Finland and this is her first album for Divine Art, and a showcase for her amazing talent at the keyboard.

Bach started to compose the “6 Concerti per il cembalo concertato” Wq 43 at the end of 1770, 2 years after moving to Hamburg and succeeding his godfather Telemann, who died on June 25th 1767, as Kapellmeister at Hamburg’s Johanneum. Their publication by Breitkopf was advertised in the Hamburg press on November 25th 1772. The concertos were designed to be widely accessible and described as “leicht”, easy, a term that lends itself to different interpretations.
The “ease” of these concertos does not just concern the instrumental and technical aspect, nor the form in which they were conceived.

On this CD for CPO the United Continuo Ensemble together with the tenor Jan Kobow presents secular songs and sacred arias by Johann Krieger taken from his collection Neue musicalische Ergätzlichkeit. Krieger’s musical language ranges from simple choral pieces through to virtuoso coloratura songs. We have combined these fascinating and multifaceted pieces with sonatas from Philipp Friedrich Buchner’s Plectrum Musicum.