Decca Essential Bach 36 of This Greatest Masterpieces

Recorded before Sir Stephen Cleobury’s untimely passing in November 2019, King’s College presents a new account of one of the greatest masterpieces in sacred music, Bach’s St Matthew Passion. For this recording Cleobury led the King’s Choir and the Academy of Ancient Music alongside some of the most outstanding British singers performing today, headed by one of the finest Evangelists of our time, James Gilchrist. The album is accompanied by a booklet with over 60 pages of texts and photographs, including a full translation by Michael Marissen and a specially-commissioned essay by John Butt.

For nearly 74 years from the death of J.S. Bach in 1750 to Mendelssohn’s fifteenth birthday in 1824 the Matthäus Passion had all but disappeared. Young Mendelssohn’s prized birthday gift - a bespoke a copy of the Passion - was to change music history when five years later he mounted its first performance in the nineteenth century in Berlin. Today it is inconceivable to imagine music without Bach, but in the 1820s his music had been relegated to no more than the exercise-book for students of counterpoint.

The musicians of The Bach Orchestra will perform Vivaldi’s most famous composition: the Four Seasons. With the Spanish violin virtuoso Enrique Gomez-Cabrero as soloist. Olga Zinovieva is singing the virtuoso arias by Vivaldi.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion is widely recognised as one of the greatest masterpieces in Western sacred music. With its double orchestra and chorus this is a work of enormous proportions in every sense, and Bach was extremely resourceful in treading a fine line between creating the almost operatic spectacle valued by the secular authorities in Leipzig, and the elevated religious atmosphere sought by the clergy. This inspired mix of moving drama and theological discourse led Leonard Bernstein to declare that ‘there is nothing like it in all of music’.

Harpsichord star Mahan Esfahani approaches one of the greatest masterpieces of the Baroque repertoire with fresh eyes: Bach’s incomparable Goldberg Variations, which he presents in a unique virtuosic way.

The death of Georg Philipp Telemann in 1767 paved the way for his godson, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach to take up the position of Director of Music in Hamburg. Prior to that C P E Bach had been working for Frederick the Second of Prussia in Berlin but longed for a greater musical freedom and stylistic flexibility that working in Hamburg would offer him. This included the composition of three oratorios, including the one presented here. C P E Bach worked on The Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus in collaboration with the librettist Karl Wilhelm Ramler from 1781, and in 1787 it was published by Breitkopf. A letter from the composer to his publisher subsequently revealed he considered it to be one of his greatest masterpieces—a reflection agreed upon by audiences at the time, and succeeding generations of composers, including Haydn and Beethoven who both drew inspiration from it.

The Brotherhood of Man ranks among the United Kingdom's most successful pop groups of all time, their long career spreading across two very separate incarnations of the band, together with a string of highly infectious hit singles that carried the group through much of their first decade together, and success at the 1976 Eurovision Song Contest.