Ton Koopman Handel, Purcel

Ton Koopman is considered to be one of the world's leading experts in the performance of music of the baroque period and particularly that of J.S. Bach. As a harpsichord player and director of the group he founded, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir, Ton Koopman has been a regular guest at leading concert halls in Vienna, London, Berlin, Brussels, Madrid, Rome, Salzburg, Tokyo and Osaka. Between 1994 and 2004 he conducted and recorded all the existing cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, and this series received many international awards, among them the BBC Music Magazine Award in 2008.

The present album collects a representative cross section of Bach’s Latin church music that complements his extensive and rich repertoire of cantatas for the Sundays and feast days of the ecclesiastical year, works which Ton Koopman has already recorded with great success for Challenge Classics. It covers a broad chronological range from Bach’s time as cantor and music director in Leipzig, and includes the Magnificat from 1723, the Sanctus from 1724, the four Kyrie-Gloria Masses from the later 1730s, and the Christmas Gloria from the mid 1740s.

The marvellous Ton Koopman plays Bach's complete works for organ in wonderful performances full of power, passion, and grace! These digital recordings were made in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, and 1999.

When this recording was released in 1996, the words most often used to describe it were "luminous" and "radiant." The adjectives fit: the choir and orchestra have a glowing sound that makes the chorales in particular wondrous to hear. The most extroverted choruses and arias lack the extra measure of vigorous excitement of John Eliot Gardiner's performance, but Koopman's tender approach is beguiling. What's more, his male soloists are marvelous: bass Klaus Mertens is sensitive and energetic in equal measure; Christoph Prégardien manages the fearsome tenor arias easily and his singing of the Evangelist's recitatives strikes a fine balance between vocalism and narration. Lisa Larsson's soprano and Elisabeth von Magnus's contralto have a purity suggestive of the teenage boys for whom Bach wrote (though one sometimes hears a youthful fragility in the voices as well).

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, as part of his regular duties as kapellmeister in Hamburg, composed 19 passion settings, alternating the four Gospel texts so that a new setting of a given text appeared once every four years, as his predecessor Georg Philipp Telemann had done. Until the discovery of the Berlin Sing-Akademie collection in Kiev in 1999, all that remained of this considerable body of work were bits and fragments of individual pieces, most of them extant because they were used in other contexts.

Much of Bach’s organ music was written during the earlier part of his career, culminating in the period he spent as court organist at Weimar. Among many well-known compositions we may single out the Dorian Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 538, the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue, BWV 564, Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542, Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582, Prelude and Fugue “St Anne”, BWV 552 (in which the fugue theme resembles the well-known English hymn of that name), Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, and the Toccata and Fugue in F, BWV 540. Chorale preludes are compositions for organ that consist of short variations on simple hymn tunes for all seasons of the church year.

This is vintage, classic Koopman: Tempi that never linger, orchestral textures that accord privilege to clarity and insight over effect and superb, beautifully articulated, solo vocal lines. Koopman's lucidity might appear a little too detached or cool for some listeners who are used to responding to the emotional charge of Bach's Passions. One of Koopman's greatest strengths is his grasp of architecture: of the unfolding of the passion events; of the relative roles and interactions of the soloists and 'crowds'; of the inevitability of events in a musical - as opposed to a Biblical - sense.