Buxtehude Opera Omnia

Under the Antoine Marchand (that's Ton Koopman in French, or Anthony Merchant in English) imprint of the Challenge Classics label, Dutch early music veteran Ton Koopman recording the large corpus of surviving works by Dietrich Buxtehude, inspired by the tercentary of the composer's death in 1707. All initial indications are that few other musicians could have done this at all, and probably no one could have done it as well.

Dieterich Buxtehude's organ works are his most significant contribution to the history of music. They consist of a comprehensive corpus of just 90 compositions, of which more than half are chorale settings. However, these are mostly shorter than the preludes, toccatas and other freely conceived pieces, so these last represent a more substantial share of his entire output.

For a long time Baroque and Bach specialst Koopman wanted to record this masterpieces of Bach and now was the time to do it! Recorded in the trusted and beautiful-sounding Walloon Church in Amsterdam. My recording of Bach’s harpsichord partitas was a long time in coming. The main reason was a lack of time (recording Bach’s complete organ works, complete cantatas and Dieterich Buxtehude’s Opera Omnia required much time and attention). Another factor was my respect for these masterpieces by Bach – they are not something to just fit in between other projects. I already had plans to record them in the 1990s, for Erato, and now that I finally am able to, it is for my own label.