Every one of the six volumes of Café Zimmermann's recordings of Bach's "Concerts avec plusiers instruments" is absolutely excellent. The music is all magnificent and played with a freshness combined with depth of understanding which is a real joy. You may like to know that they have now been issued as a set J.S. Bach: Concertos with Several Instruments Complete Works Vol. I-VI which I recommend in the strongest possible terms.
It was only when Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was appointed Musikdirektor in Hamburg that he started to compose a large amount of religious music. This, of course, was part of his job, but the fact that he had applied for this job is an indication that he didn't see any problem in writing music for the church and for specific occasions. It has taken a long time before the religious repertoire of Emanuel has been taken seriously, and it still doesn't belong to the core of religious music performed by today's choirs and orchestras.
Exclusive Sony Classical pianist Murray Perahia releases this collection of the keyboard concertos of J.S Bach. Celebrated by his fans and media alike on first release, several of the concertos have been unavailable for some time and make a welcome return to the catalogue, The set contains some of Perahia’s all-time best-selling recordings. The initial releases of these recordings of the Concertos Nos. 1-7 have sold in excess of 30,000 units in the UK alone, Murray Perahia’s recording of Bach’s Solo Keyboard Partitas 1,5 & 6 (88697565602) won the 2010 BBC Music Magazine Award for Best Instrumental Recording.
Hyperion is delighted to present the debut recording of the wonderful young harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani. He was the first harpsichordist to be named a BBC New Generation Artist or to be awarded a fellowship prize by the Borletti- Buitoni Trust. Here Mahan Esfahani has recorded CPE Bach's six 'Württemberg' sonatas, which were written in 1742 and published in 1744, and his thrillingly intense performances make the best possible case for this dramatic, beautifully written, endlessly imaginative but for some reason under-performed music.
Over the past five years, pianist Anna Vinnitskaya has made three Alpha recordings dedicated to Shostakovitch, Brahms et Rachmaninov. Evgeni Koroliov is a great master of the piano, a great Bach specialist, whose recordings of Bach are an acclaimed benchmark. His piano duo with his wife, Ljupka Hadzi-Georgieva, has made its mark over the past few years in all the major international concert venues. Also a highly reputed teacher, Koroliov was Anna Vinnitskaya’s professor at Hamburg.
The extant concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach for one harpsichord and strings were all composed before 1738, which makes them some of the first, if not the first keyboard concertos – a genre destined to become one of the most popular within classical music. In all likelihood Bach wrote them for his own use (or that of his talented sons) – probably to be performed with Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum of which he had taken over as director in 1729. The fresh and exuberant character one finds in the concertos seems to reflect how much Bach enjoyed the opportunity to engage with his fellow musicians.