Bach

Professor Greenberg sets Bach in context by tracing the musical traditions and composers from whom he drew his inspiration, and explaining how Bach absorbed these influences to become the transcendent composer of the High Baroque. According to Professor Greenberg, no other composer is more representative of the period and its aesthetic of emotional extravagance and technical control.You will also learn how Bach's background—at least 42 of his relatives were professionally involved with music—and his strong German Lutheran heritage shaped his development as an artist.

Underappreciated in his own time, Johann Sebastian Bach has ascended to Olympian heights in the estimation of generations of music lovers. But what is it about his music that makes it great? Composer and musicologist Robert Greenberg helps you hear the extraordinary sweep of Bach's music and understand his compositional language—whether you're a devoted admirer or a casual listener.

It would be impossible to say enough good about this two-disc set of Sviatoslav Richter playing Bach. Coupling three English suites and three French suites plus a pair of toccatas and a fantasia in live recordings from 1991 and 1992, Richter gives every movement, line, rhythm, and note its own weight and character, but also conveys every detail's critical function in the work as a whole. One could, for instance, characterize his E flat major French Suite as serene, his F major English Suite as playful, or his D minor Toccata as thoughtful, but doing so would not fully capture Richter's fusion of individuality and inevitability.

The pure polyphonic quality of J.S. Bach’s Inventions and Sinfonias cannot be overstated – simple yet bursting with ideas, they offer an agile introduction to late-baroque musical forms and imitative writing in general, while retaining a cantabile feel. These exquisite miniatures, transcendent of the didactic purpose to which they were relegated for too long, provide an orderly and at once concise and comprehensive survey of Bach’s soundscape. The purity and density of their musical substance, distilled in a sort of abstract and universal language, has naturally encouraged numerous arrangements from the 19th century onwards for vast array of other instruments.

Blandine Verlet, a noted French harpsichordist, studied with Ruggiero Gerlin and Ralph Kirkpatrick. She began recording in the late 1970s for Philips, switching to the Astree label in the 1990s. Her recordings range from J.S. Bach's keyboard works to Froberger to lesser known composers such as Louis Couperin and Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre. Her second recording of the Goldberg Variations, in 1992, has been called "one of the finest harpsichord versions in the catalog." With violinist Gerard Poulet she has recorded early violin sonatas by Mozart, using the older Baroque keyboard instruments rather than a fortepiano or modern piano. Verlet has also worked with flutist Stephen Preston and viola da gambist Jordi Savall. Her playing is noted for her control and restraint in not letting emotion carry her away.