Vivaldi Sacred Works For Soprano And Concertos

The Tulipa Consort, making its CD début here, is unusual in that it is an instrumental ensemble formed by a singer. Johanette Zomer tells us that, tired of having to make difficult artistic compromises with conductors, she decided to create her own hand-picked body of players to allow her “artistic freedom from the very beginning”. If that sounds like the utterances of a true diva, determined to guarantee herself top-billing and to be sure of showing her voice off to its fullest unimpeded by the artistic sensibilities of others, the evidence of this CD could not be more contrary.

Nicola Porpora was a Napolitan composer of Baroque operas and singing teacher, whose the most famous singing student was the castrato Farinelli. Besides some four dozen operas, there are oratorios, solo cantatas with keyboard accompaniment, motets and vocal serenades. Among his larger works, his 1720 opera Orlando, his Venetian Vespers, and the opera Arianna in Nasso have been recorded.

A beautifully-packaged 50-disc box set, released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, one of the most important and adventurous early music labels. The set contains 50 classic recordings of baroque and ancient music, chosen to represent the breadth of this huge and varied catalogue and each disc is slip-cased with artwork replicating the original CD or LP artwork.

Widely regarded as one of the foremost interpreters of Bach's music today, Masaaki Suzuki has made his name both as the artistic director of the Bach Collegium Japan and as a performer on the harpsichord and the organ. Much interest has been focussed on the BCJ/Suzuki series of Bach Cantatas, begun in 1995 and reaching its final stretch with the recent release of Volume 46 (of a projected 55 discs). Hailed by the international music press, this monumental undertaking has acquired a world-wide following. From the very beginning of the collaboration with BIS, however, there have been numerous recording projects beyond the sacred cantatas of Johannes Sebastian, and, indeed, beyond Bach himself. Some of these acclaimed recordings can now be found in a limited edition boxed set, released in connection with the 20th anniversary of Bach Collegium Japan this year.

75 CD box set (with original jackets) is the first complete collection comprising all of Reinhard Goebel's recordings on Archiv Produktion. It shows Reinhard Goebel as a violinist, conductor, music scholar, and founder of his celebrated ensemble Musica Antiqua Koln. Featuring almost 30 years of recording history from the Neapolitan Recorder Concertos from 1978 to Telemann's Flute Quartets recorded in 2005.

75 CD box set (with original jackets) is the first complete collection comprising all of Reinhard Goebel's recordings on Archiv Produktion. It shows Reinhard Goebel as a violinist, conductor, music scholar, and founder of his celebrated ensemble Musica Antiqua Koln. Featuring almost 30 years of recording history from the Neapolitan Recorder Concertos from 1978 to Telemann's Flute Quartets recorded in 2005.

This is an excellent and varied selection of composers from the very well known like Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach and Vivaldi, through the less famous but familiar like Frescobaldi, Sainte-Colombe and Zelenka, to the downright obscure. It is all delightful: the musicians are uniformly excellent, and include such great names as Gustav Leonhardt, Cantus Colln, Christopher Hogwood and so on. They give fine performances both of the familiar works and of the less familiar ones. Obviously there will be discs you like more than others and you may already have favourite versions of some works, but these discs are never less than very good and are often outstanding.

This disc contains some sonatas for wind instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach from his years in Weimar (1708-17) and Cöthen (1717-23), having in common – as they have come down to us or as several musicologists have proposed – their being intended for the recorder and/or the oboe. The interchangeability of instrumentation, linked to different creative periods, to practical contingencies, and to the inexhaustible desire for perfection that induced the genius of Eisenach, according to the testimony of his earliest biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, to continually revise his own works, often makes it difficult to go beyond their sterile catalogue dates in tracing their evolution. For this reason an experimental approach was chosen here, to bring back to their presumably original state what today is a handful of works, which were part of a much larger repertory. Chamber music was becoming the composer’s principal occupation in the time period under consideration, which was decisive in the progress of Bach’s career from organist to Konzertmeister (1714) and then to Kapellmeister of a Calvinist court (1717) essentially devoted to the cultivation of secular music.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the most prolific composers in the history of music – also literally, with his twenty children, but mainly in terms of his exceptional output. In spite of this, those of his works which appeared in print during his lifetime are less numerous than the proverbial tip of the iceberg. This does not imply that his music did not circulate: indeed, at his time, the favourite means of dissemination of musical works was through manuscript copies. Printing was reserved for works which were considered as particularly meaningful, and which represented the composer at his or her best; for works which had, therefore, also a “promotional” dimension, and which could foster the composer’s career by obtaining him or her fame, reputation, and possibly also a prestigious post.