Bach

Béla Bartók’s monumental Mikrokosmos, containing 153 mainly short “progressive” piano pieces composed between 1932 and 1939, is both a very special piano method and a collection of wonderfully original performance pieces (the series actually contains almost the complete piano music by Bartók from the 1930s).

After the dearth of major festivals in the middle of the weeks following Trinity Sunday, the end of the Lutheran church year sees two important ones, the feast of St. Michael and All Angels and Reformation Day. Both fall on fixed dates, so that their position in relation to the numbered Sundays after Trinity varies from year to year. Reformation Day celebrates Martin Luther’s historic nailing of his 95 Theses to the door of the church of Wittenberg Castle, and it is observed on the anniversary of the event, 31 October (except in a few places which chose to do so on the Sunday following that date).

This section contains cantatas for the Sixth to Seventeenth Sundays after Trinity: a period when no festivals occur. The same is often said of the whole of the second half of the church year but that is not altogether true. There are no major feasts between the Visitation on 2 July and Michaelmas on 29 September but the intervening weeks are far from drab and uneventful. To this day, each single Sunday in the period spotlights an important event in Christ’s ministry on earth, and the cantatas selected for this section almost all refer to that and only exceptionally and less pointedly to the Epistle for the day.

Deutschlandfunk Kultur and Rondeau Production present the new recording of the well-known Christmas oratorio by Johann Sebastian Bach: Sonically, the new double CD has some special features to offer.

Lang Lang presents the Goldberg Variations Extended Deluxe Edition, the upcoming edition features seven bonus tracks and is set for release as a digital album on 12 February 2021. This new digital edition includes 7 brand-new tracks by Bach and his contemporaries, added to Lang Lang’s studio recording and his live version of the Goldberg Variation.

For this release, pianist Dina Ugorskaja has recorded Book I and II of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in Cooperation with Bayerische Rundfunk in Munich.

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.

Rademann makes Bach shine writes pizzicato about the series.

After mastering the Sonatas and Partitas, Mario Brunello continues his trilogy devoted to reinterpreting Bach’s violin masterpieces on the violoncello piccolo.

One of the world’s best-loved artists, and a longtime proponent of Bach on the modern piano, Murray Perahia has been hailed as one of the composer’s “most rewarding interpreters both live and on disc.” For his debut recording on Deutsche Grammophon, Perahia turns to the six French Suites – works that are at once delicate, profound, tender and joyful, and all suffused with the rhythmic vitality of the dance. Perahia produced a series of award-winning recordings of Bach's keyboard works in the late 1990s and since then Bach has become his bench mark. Bach’s French Suites are new to his recording catalogue. It is his first release in the past 5 years and first release for DG.