Mass B Bach

…Bach's Mass in B Minor is undoubtedly his most spectacular choral work and the Dunedin Consort's soloist-led performance enables a level of clarity and expression that is not traditionally a feature of modern choral performance…

Now presented complete, Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion’s exceptional Lutheran Mass performances, in this often unjustly neglected genre, remind us of Bach’s telling psychological shift in the early 1730s from ephemeral duty to collating collections of music for posterity. The four parody Missae breves, comprised of a Kyrie and Gloria only, in the north German way, were compiled by Bach from cantata movements he clearly admired and felt could be productively recycled. Then there’s also the Missa of 1733 – the work which Bach offered to the new Elector of Saxony in search of wider recognition and which was to become the blueprint for that summa anthology, the Mass in B minor – now assembled with the others and strengthening the identity of Bach’s Mass oeuvre further.

My Bach Partitas: I got to know Johann Sebastian Bach before I started playing, with the Motets on an LP disc that I wore out listening to, and with a short passage from the St Matthew Passion that I sang while my father accompanied me on the piano. Bach has always been present in my musical life and has been the safe harbour from which I have departed to discover other routes and then return regularly.

The b minor mass is truly one of the cultural pillars of Western civilization. Whether it is a complete patchwork or put together from pieces of a design (most musicologists suggest the latter), this music is- certainly metaphorically and possibly literally- divine! Franz Bruggen chooses to use tempos, not even matched by Gardiner.

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his orchestral music such as the Brandenburg Concertos; instrumental compositions such as the Cello Suites; keyboard works such as the Goldberg Variations and The Well-Tempered Clavier; organ works such as the Schubler Chorales and the Toccata and Fugue in D minor; and vocal music such as the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor. Since the 19th-century Bach revival he has been generally regarded as one of the greatest composers in the history of Western music.