Koch

Bach’s lost St Mark Passion was first performed in Leipzig on Good Friday 1731 and a second time in 1744 in a revised version. Though Bach's music is lost, the libretto by Picander is still extant, and from this, the work can to some degree be reconstructed. Unlike Bach's earlier existing passions (St John Passion and St Matthew Passion), the Markus-Passion is probably a parody – it recycles previous works. Which of his own works Bach may have taken for his St Mark Passion led to numerous speculations. Differently from further reconstructions the Frankfurt musicologist Prof. Karl Böhmer used the revised Picander text from 1744 which schedules one Aria and a chorale more than the 1731 version. Other parts have been revised and complemented.

Ruth Gipps (1921 – 1999) was born in the English seaside resort of Bexhill-on-Sea. Encouraged as a child by an ambitious pianist mother, she appeared locally as a prodigy pianist. She was accepted by the Royal College of Music in 1937, at the age of sixteen, having won the Caird Scholarship. She quickly matured, both as composer and pianist. She studied with Vaughan Williams and Gordon Jacob, and later the oboe with Leon Goossens. During the Second World War she gained a position as oboist with the City of Birmingham Orchestra and devoted a great deal of her time to composing. Three of the works on this album were composed during the war: the Oboe Concerto, the tone poem Death on the Pale Horse, and the overture Chanticleer (derived from an opera which, sadly, she never completed).

Pimpinone, TWV 21:15, is a comic opera by the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann with a libretto by Johann Philipp Praetorius. Its full title is Die Ungleiche Heirat zwischen Vespetta und Pimpinone oder Das herrsch-süchtige Camer Mägden (The Unequal Marriage Between Vespetta and Pimpinone or The Domineering Chambermaid). The work is described as a Lustiges Zwischenspiel ("comic intermezzo") in three parts. It was first performed at the Theater am Gänsemarkt, Hamburg on 27 September 1725 as light relief between the acts of Telemann's adaptation of Handel's opera seria Tamerlano. Pimpinone was highly successful and pointed the way forward to later intermezzi, particularly Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La serva padrona.

The first Japanese composer to achieve international status, Tōru Takemitsu proposed a fusion between Western music and the culture of his country. His music radiates a lyrical intensity that comes as much from his roots in the early modernists Debussy and Alban Berg as from his affinity with the more overtly experimental mid-twentieth-century styles of John Cage and Morton Feldman. Played throughout the world, he is considered one of the most important composers of the second half of the 20th century.

The idea of an afterlife has fired imaginations across cultures for millennia and is one of the earliest belief systems in recorded history. It is fascinating to consider that a type of identity or stream of consciousness might exist in the absence of the physical body.

Werther is one of Rolando Villazón's signature roles and it's easy to see why; he brings both intensity and vulnerable sensitivity to the part of the anguished poet, and he's a terrifically nuanced singing actor. All of the elements of the live 2011 performance from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in fact, are so strong that this recording easily takes a place among the most effective and affecting accounts of the opera. Antonio Pappano, music director of the Royal Opera House, draws impassioned playing and sumptuous, sensual tone from the orchestra. The group responds beautifully to Pappano's subtly inflected and dramatically charged vision of the score.