Bach Kuhnau

Gustav Leonhardt was one of the most important harpsichord and organ players in the world and a very well-known specialist in baroque music. Gustav Leonhardt -The Edition is a 15-CD retrospective containing a representative selection of his numerous recordings, including famous solo recordings such as the legendary Goldberg Variations and Bach's organ and harpsichord works. 6 CDs feature collaborations with his famous colleagues Sigiswald Kuijken, Frans Bruggen and Anner Bylsma, the Leonhardt-Consort and Harry van der Kamp.

Gustav Leonhardt, one of the stalwarts of the "early music movement" has just passed a significant birthday and Sony has pulled together a representative 15 titles from his time with the label and put them in a clam-shell box.

LEIPZIG is now touted as the “New Berlin”, a mecca for vogueish twenty-somethings who are drawn by the cheap rents in the city and an artistic vibe. In 1989 the former East German industrial hub was said to have the most polluted air in the country, but the city’s illustrious past lives on. Despite extensive bombing of the city in World War II, the famous Thomaskirche and its associated Thomasschule, one of the oldest schools in the world and where the choristers are educated, survive and flourish. The Gewandhaus orchestra, with origins dating to the time of Johann Sebastian Bach in the 1740s, is known as one of the world’s finest symphony orchestras. This recording gives us a picture of musical life in Leipzig some 300 years ago, spanning the consecutive careers of three composers who led the musical activities in the city. The programme demonstrates the connection between JS Bach and his two predecessors. Bach based the general shape of his Magnificat on that of Kuhnau’s, and it was first performed in 1723, the year Bach took over as cantor in Leipzig after Kuhnau’s death. The short Schelle piece provides a rousing advent introduction.

To celebrate Ricercar’s fortieth anniversary, with the symbolic total running time of forty hours of music, this box set assembles a vast anthology of seventeenth-century German music, an area that clearly emerges here as the label’s main focus. The anthology ends with a selection of the very first compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, in which the link with the music of previous generations is still very perceptible. Some of the finest artists and ensembles ever featured on the label are included here, such as Andrea Buccarella, Brice Sailly, Yoanna Moulin, Capella Sancti Michaelis, Ex Tempore, Musica Aurea, and many more.

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.

The unprecedented expansion of music in the age of enlightenment
The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down.

The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since Antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age– every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the Revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follow in many respects the agenda set by the eighteenth century.