Kind in Dir

Following the album Arias, her much-acclaimed debut album on Sony Classical, the German soprano returns to Bach with three famous cantatas she has never recorded before. Regardless of their extraordinary musical beauty all of these cantatas are concerned with religious considerations of grief, guilt and farewell. Based on the Italian model of solo cantata which reached its peak in the extensive output of Alessandro Scarlatti, these melodious and touching pieces highlight Schäfer´s outstanding vocal abilities and musical taste. The arias offer most delightful duets with various instrumental solo parts such as flute, oboe and violin. Christine Schäfer is accompanied by the Berliner Barocksolisten, a first-class ensemble of players from the Berlin Philharmonic who perform on modern instruments in historically informed style.

Nikolai Demidenko's large-scale pianism suits Busoni's Bach transcriptions to a tee. Listen first to the E minor prelude; you sense that Demidenko truly revels in the music's declamatory syntax and booming bass lines. Part of this may have to do with the pianist's Fazioli concert grand, whose resonance cuts like a saber wrapped in a velvet cloak. Demidenko sculpts fluid paragraphs out of the D major fugue's superficially repetitious sequences, and takes the hybrid Fantasia, Adagio, and Fugue at a brisk, vehement clip. The pianist forges an effortless link between the unfinished fugue's last measures and Busoni's unmistakably crabbed conclusion.

As the son-in-law of Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Chrisoph Altnickol, who married Bach’s daughter Elisabeth Juliana Friederica in 1749, was closely associated with the Bach family. A reference written by his father-in-law which has been preserved testifies to the “very special skill” which Altnickol possessed as a composer and organist. Only a small fraction of Altnickol’s compositions have survived: aside from a few instrumental works, these consist primarily of a small number of works of sacred music, most of which are presented on this CD, and most are world premiere recordings. They include the Kyrie-Gloria-Messe in D minor. In his works Altnickol appears, in varying degrees, to be influenced by his teacher, Johann Sebastian Bach…