Bach

Every cellist of renown eventually faces up to the Everest of their repertoire, the solo Cello Suites of J.S. Bach. For Giovanni Sollima, this has been a work of many years in the making, as he explains in a booklet introduction.

Every cellist of renown eventually faces up to the Everest of their repertoire, the solo Cello Suites of J.S. Bach. For Giovanni Sollima, this has been a work of many years in the making, as he explains in a booklet introduction.
As with so many musicians, he suddenly found empty time stretching before him during the pandemic, and this space for reflection and study enabled him to deepen his relationship with music which he has known for decades.

Bach, in his time, could never have envisioned his music being recorded. When we first embarked on our journey with the Oxford Bach Soloists, our focus was not on recording. We were immersed in the live experience, discovering Bach’s vocal works chronologically, in real-time. It was about living the music as all those who performed and heard it did, tracing his steps through each note and phrase. Featuring two of our core Soloists, Nick Pritchard (tenor) and Yu-Wei Hu (flute), this album presents three of Bach’s Cantatas. These include possibly his earliest vocal work, Christ lag in Todesbanden (BWV 4), his only extant tenor cantata, Ich armer Mensch (BWV 55), and the much-beloved cantata, Ich habe genug, showcased here in its arrangement for high voice and flute (BWV 82.2). This recording is a celebration of our journey with Bach, and an invitation to experience his timeless music through our own journey of dedication and discovery.

Suzuki presents the 1749 version of the St. John Passion, a work that underwent many changes since its first performance in 1724.

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.

The Finnish-Cuban pianist Anton Mejias announces his upcoming debut solo album on DG, The Art of Memory. It’s a bold live recording from the Dresdner Musikfestspiele 2024, where he deftly interweaves Book II of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier with Philip Lasser’s Twelve Preludes: The Art of Memory.

Following his recording of the first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier released last year (BIS-2621), which was praised as 'a pleasurable benchmark for anyone seeking a traversal that honours every detail of the music' (Gramophone), harpsichordist Masato Suzuki now offers us his interpretation of the second book of Bach's masterly cycle of preludes and fugues. No other works from the baroque period have been as cherished, performed and studied as these collections, the objectives of which were musical, theoretical and didactic.

Following his recording of the first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier released last year (BIS-2621), which was praised as 'a pleasurable benchmark for anyone seeking a traversal that honours every detail of the music' (Gramophone), harpsichordist Masato Suzuki now offers us his interpretation of the second book of Bach's masterly cycle of preludes and fugues.