Handel Jacobs

The success story of the passion cantata Der Tod Jesu is without its equal in the music history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and gradually obscured the rest of the composer Carl Heinrich Graun’s extensive vocal and instrumental oeuvre. His Easter Oratorio, which cpo is now releasing as a recording premiere in an interpretation on historical instruments by the Kölner Akademie under the conductor Michael Alexander Willens, unfortunately suffered the same fate. The music is extremely imaginative and festive and displays a musical affinity to Bach’s cantata oeuvre.

Johann Sebastian Bach - Cantates Pour Alto BWV 35, 53 & 82
Ensemble 415 / Rene Jacobs / Chiara Banchini
EAC+LOG+CUE | WV: 257 MB | Full Artwork: 108 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Harmonia Mundi # HMA 1951273 | Country/Year: France 1987, 2003
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque, Vocal

"Ensemble 415 is a chamber ensemble devoted largely to the performance of Baroque music on period instruments. The numerical reference in the group's name derives from the pitch used for tuning instruments in the Baroque era. In performing chamber music, Ensemble 415 consists of just a few players, but for larger compositions, the number expands to a minimum of 13 and can reach up to as high as 40 performers. The ensemble's repertory has been broad over the years, taking in many Baroque standards by J.S. Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, as well as lesser known fare by Muffat and others…"

Freiburger Barockorchester (Freiburg Baroque Orchestra) is a German orchestra founded in 1987, with the mission statement: "to enliven the world of baroque music with new sounds". They are based in Freiburg im Breisgau, hence the name, and have recently started performed works by later composers such as Beethoven, Schubert and Weber as well as contemporary music.

This is an excellent and varied selection of composers from the very well known like Palestrina, Monteverdi, Bach and Vivaldi, through the less famous but familiar like Frescobaldi, Sainte-Colombe and Zelenka, to the downright obscure. It is all delightful: the musicians are uniformly excellent, and include such great names as Gustav Leonhardt, Cantus Colln, Christopher Hogwood and so on. They give fine performances both of the familiar works and of the less familiar ones. Obviously there will be discs you like more than others and you may already have favourite versions of some works, but these discs are never less than very good and are often outstanding.