Bach The Musical Offering

There are many apocryphal stories in the classical-music world, but the one in which Frederick the Great challenged Bach to improvise a six-part fugue on a theme of the king's own invention is true, and The Musical Offering was, after a period of further reflection, the result. As with all the works of Bach's later years, the work is both great art and a "teaching piece," which shows everything that he thought could be done with the king's theme. The Trio Sonata based on the theme is the only major piece of chamber music from Bach's last decades in Leipzig, and that makes the work and essential cornerstone of any Bach collection. This performance, led by Neville Marriner, is both polished and lively, and very well recorded. At a "twofer" price, coupled with The Art of Fugue, it's the preferred version of the work on modern instruments.

In this new recording Phantasm make no excuses for arranging some of Bach’s remarkable keyboard music for a consort of viols. Led by director Laurence Dreyfus they go on a conscious mission to uncover the hidden riches concealed behind the more neutral resources of the harpsichord and organ so as to liberate the fascinating characters lurking in the shadows and behind the scenes within Bach’s individual polyphonic lines. In the process of fugal confrontation among three to six musicians, they come face to face with the astounding psychological insights of Bach’s most radical inventions.

This long-deleted Essential Classics reissue (available again courtesy of Arkivmusic.com’s on-demand reprint program) comprises the first CD remastering of two separate Bach piano releases. One disc features Rosalyn Tureck’s Bach Album, an early-1981 digital production made up mostly of short pieces, plus the Aria and Variations in Italian Style. The close-up yet warm sonics capture the full measure of Tureck’s technical specificity, subtle use of color, and micromanaged dynamics. Notice her absolute linear control in the F minor suite’s Prelude (first sound clip), or how her seemingly over-detached articulations (the seventh Italian variation) always maintain a lilting presence.

Originally released between 1975 to 1991 on the now-defunct Calliope label, Andre Isoir's recordings of the complete organ works of Bach have been unanimously acclaimed by both the press and the public. La Dolce Volta now offers these landmark recordings (unavailable since 2008), completely remastered, in a deluxe, specially priced boxed set. The set includes a 152 page, full color booklet rich with photos and information about the music and the recordings.

This performance of Bach's Art of Fugue is an analog recording originally released in 1986. It was first digitally mastered and offered on CD in 1988, then was re-mastered in 2001 and paired with a new recording of Bach's Musical Offering as part of Alia Vox's boxed-set edition "The Testament of Bach". Now the performance has again been re-mastered as a full SACD multi-channel hybrid, and it has much in common with its companion Musical Offering recorded 14 years later and also directed by Jordi Savall (with his ensemble Le Concerts de Nations)…

–John Greene, ClassicsToday.com

The conceit that informs this disc is that Bach and Webern's meditations of life, death, and eternity are essentially complementary, that Bach's Lutheran faith and Baroque aesthetic and Webern's Catholic faith and Modernist aesthetic speak of a shared belief in the luminous and the numinous. Indeed, so pervasive is the conceit that complementary performances of Webern's orchestration of Bach's Ricercata in six voices from The Musical Offering opens and closes the disc. And so successful is the conceit that this otherwise tired trick is incredibly effective.

The many years Martin Stadtfeld devoted to studying the music of Johann Sebastian Bach are now also bearing compositional fruit. On his new CD he presents his own arrangements and works, which are closely linked with Bach’s musical cosmos.