Vivaldi Sacd

Masaaki Suzuki was an organist before he was a conductor, and his recordings of Bach's organ works have made a delightful coda to his magisterial survey of Bach cantatas with his Bach Collegium Japan. This selection, the second in a series appearing on the BIS label, gives a good idea of the gems available. You get a good mix of pieces, including a pair of Bach's Vivaldi transcriptions. Fans of Suzuki's cantata series will be pleased to note the similarities in his style between his conducting and his organ playing: there's a certain precise yet deliberate and lush quality common to both. And he has a real co-star here: the organ of the Kobe Shoin Women's University Chapel, built in 1983 by French maker Marc Garnier. The realizations of Bach's transcriptions of Vivaldi concertos fare especially well here, with a panoply of subtle colors in the organ. Sample the first movement of the Concerto in D minor, BWV 596, with its mellow yet transcendently mysterious tones in the string ripieni. BIS backs Suzuki up with marvelously clear engineering in the small Japanese chapel, and all in all, this is a Bach organ recording that stands out from the crowd. Highly recommended.

Since 1987, Dan Laurin has released some thirty titles on BIS. On his latest disc, Sonates et Suites he has chosen to visit France at an exciting point in time. In the early 18th century, when all of the sonatas and suites included here were composed, the system of censorship that ensured that nothing was printed without royal permission was beginning to crumble, at least in the field of music.

These are fine performances of the foundational documents of the modern instrumental sonata, but listeners should sample them and be sure they're on board with all of the assumptions being made here. Corelli's 12 Violin Sonatas, Op. 5, are divided between the sonata da camera (chamber sonata) and sonata da chiesa (church sonata) types, between short suites of dance-based movements and abstract, mostly binary structures, respectively.

Paul Julien André Mauriat was a French orchestra leader, conductor of Le Grand Orchestre de Paul Mauriat, who specialized in the easy listening genre. He is best known in the United States for his million-selling remake of André Popp's "Love is Blue", which was #1 for 5 weeks in 1968. Other recordings for which he is known include "El Bimbo", "Toccata", "Love in Every Room/Même si tu revenais", and "Penelope"…

Here is something unusual among the growing number of recordings of Heinrich von Biber's Rosary Sonatas; in Arts two-disc SACD set featuring violinist Riccardo Minasi and Bizzarrie Armoniche, Biber's set of 15 Sonatas realized with a full, Italian style continuo and Italian violin ornamentation. The accepted standard, for decades, was continuo realization with organ alone, and eventually the notion of a cello or theorbo joining the band gained acceptance.