Johann Sebastian Bach 333

Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental St. Matthew Passion was first performed on Good Friday in 1727 at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. It is the largest single composition Bach ever wrote, both in terms of length and in terms of instrumental and vocal forces. It requires two choruses, two orchestras, four vocal soloists for the arias and vocal soloists for each of the various character parts. Philippe Herreweghe's 1999 recording of Bach's masterpiece features a stellar cast and was a perennial catalog bestseller.

In its way, this German release is more radical than many of the other discs on which recorder players have asserted their rights to big swaths of the Baroque repertory. The radical quality doesn't lie in the arrangement of Bach works for the recorder, which in no way goes beyond Bach's own musical recycling ethic. (Three works were originally written for flute, one was an organ trio sonata, one was a violin sonata, and one is for harpsichord alone.) The unusual quality of the arrangement instead lies in the treatment of the accompanimental harpsichord, which is all alone with no gamba or anything else supporting its fundamental line.

These performances by the Ricercar Consort and its legendary quartet of soloists, from the series Deutsche Barock Kantaten, were created at a time when historical performance practice was new and sprang from original research into the performance practice. This style of music-making is now completely integrated into contemporary musical life thanks partly to these Baroque pioneers.

Legendary conductor and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy releases Johann Sebastian Bach's English Suites 1 - 3. This stunning, brand-new recording sits alongside a remastering of his first-ever Bach recording, the D Minor Concerto, recorded in 1965 in a must-have 2 CD Digipak collection. Amassing over 850M streams with a vast catalogue, Ashkenazy is amongst the foremost musical figures of our time and this release is a must-have for any classical music fan.

Following its highly acclaimed album featuring the three most richly scored Ouvertures (Gramophone Editor’s Choice – shortlisted for the 2017 Gramophone Awards and included among the Top 10 recent Bach recordings), Zefiro comes full circle with the famous collection of Concerts avec plusieurs instruments, that kaleidoscope of colours that seems almost tailor-made to highlight the salient qualities of the ensemble founded by the three historical wind specialists, Alfredo Bernardini and Paolo and Alberto Grazzi.

Johann Sebastian Bach composed his most renowned organ works — the Toccatas, the Fantasia in G minor and the Passacaglia in C minor — in Weimar, in the stylus fantasticus so beloved of his Northern German masters Buxtehude and Reinken. Bach here follows in his predecessors’ footsteps in all of these large-scale works: the freely inventive writing in the preludes is linked to the rigour of the fugal construction and so brings them to a majestic conclusion.

Violinst Rachel Podger presents the first recording of Bach's Cello Suites on violin. Bach had a habit of recycling his own compositions for different instruments and different uses. The examples are endless; concertos appearing as sinfonias in cantatas, or concertos for violins turned into harpsichord concertos. Podger, who has spent a fair bit of time coaching cellists, both modern and baroque alike, found herself playing along to demonstrate various points. ''I started catching myself playing some of the movements I particularly loved while warming up, and realizing that it was actually possible to play them on the violin, and to find a special expressive vocabulary at the higher pitch.''