Altmeyer

Kurt Redel conducts unaffectedly but with passion and is beautifully supported in this with an excellent orchestra and beautifully balanced choir of faultless intonation. The story moves at a good pace as the the tragedy unfolds and is interspersed with some stunning arias, many of them affording moments of still reflection as is befitting for a passion. The singers are faultless and often superb with Sena Jurinac at the height of her artistry, Theo Altmeyer a fine evangelist who knows how to tell a story. Franz Crass always was a lovely, musical singer with a well-rounded, rich voice.

Among traditional modern-instrument versions of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Wolfgang Gönnenwein’s 1968 recording has a lot to offer. Not least is the excellent choral singing from top to bottom. The texts are always clear, and the pacing for the chorales is governed by the story’s dramatic unfolding. You can’t help but be hooked by Evangelist Theo Altmeyer’s warm tone and vivid portrayal, complemented by Franz Crass’ sonorous, touching Jesus. What a joy it is to hear Teresa Zylis-Gara, Julia Hamari, and Hermann Prey at the peak of their respective powers. Tenor Nicolai Gedda is heard to better advantage with Gönnenwein than in Otto Klemperer’s recording, where he struggled with that conductor’s craggy tempos. The orchestra plays beautifully, and the engineering does full justice to Bach’s antiphonal interplay.

Ausdrucksstarke und spannungsgeladene deutsche Passion und eine tolle und auch preiswerte Alternative zu den bekannten Bach-Werken. Von den zwanzig überlieferten Telemann-Passionen ist keine wie die andere, was diesen Komponisten immer wieder hörenswert macht. Anders als sonst üblich wird dieses Werk bestimmt von dem stetigen Wechsel zwischen Rezitativ und Chor; auf Arien wird weitgehend verzichtet, was das Hören kurzweilig macht. Die Arien sind spannungsgeladen, fast weltlich.Vorliegende Einspielung des Hessischer Kammerorchesters ist musikalisch von guter Qualität und stimmlich gut besetzt.

J.S. Bach's Johannes-Passion, or St. John Passion, BWV 245 – one of just two surviving Bach Passion works out of an original four or five – is, simply put, a headache for editors and performers wishing to recreate the authentic, stamped-and-approved original work. There is no such beast: the work was performed at least four times during Bach's lifetime, and for each new presentation he overhauled the music, adding numbers, deleting numbers, changing numbers, so that today we really have four different St. John Passions through which to pick and choose our way. Happily enough, however, Bach misses the mark in not a single one of those numbers, and the director can hardly go wrong selecting from such a wealth of fine material.

On the surface, this Ring cycle recording might seem like a poor relation to those by Sir Georg Solti, Herbert von Karajan, James Levine, and others, or to the live recordings from the 1950s by the likes of Wilhelm Furtwängler, Clemens Kraus, and Hans Knappertsbusch. The very names constitute big guns in opera, and their respective casts are not exactly weak either. Complicating matters further is the fact that Marek Janowski's Ring was originally released by Eurodisc/Ariola, a European-based label that, while huge over there, never had the profile or prestige of Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, orEMI; the fact that it's now on RCA/BMG doesn't exactly help, either, as the latter has lost a good deal of its luster as a major label since the 1980s. But the Janowski Ring also occupies its own place in history…

This set includes two of the rarest and hardest to find of all recordings: the 1958-59 version of the Bach Cello Suites by Janos Starker – the one everyone says his later recordings cannot match – and the extremely beautiful performance of Bach's unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas – the one that Japanese collectors pay 3-digit dollar prices for – in outstanding EMI Digital Re-Masterings.

A good first introduction to the musical worlds of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach is the recently released 10-CD box "C.P.E. Bach Edition ", on which the German 'harmonia mundi' has compiled high-quality recordings from the past 50 years.