Orchestral Suites Bach

While most serious listeners already have their favorite sets of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos and the Orchestral Suites, newcomers searching for respectable recordings at a reasonable price would do well to start with this triple-CD set by Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. These recordings were made in 1984 and 1985, and still offer fine sound for early digital recording and exceptional musical value. Marriner's performances may not be as exacting and scrupulous about Baroque performance practice as those of Gustav Leonhardt or Trevor Pinnock, but they are informed by serious scholarship and have sufficient appeal to make the finer points debatable.

Karl Richter’s recordings of Bach’s orchestral and sacred music influenced an entire generation of musicians and listeners, presenting the conductor’s unique sound and style. When Richter recorded Bach’s works, he freed them from a ponderous tradition that had mired the music in romantic sounds and idiom. Richter lightened Bach’s music, and, with an orchestra of outstanding musicians, helped bring it toward the more modern interpretations that listeners have become familiar with today. This is still a bit far from the historically-informed performances that are pretty much the norm, but there is a unity and natural originality that comes through the music in these recordings.

In the early phase of the movement for authentic period practice, Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert were practically household names – in early music households, anyway – because of their critically acclaimed performances of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and other Baroque composers. These exciting recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos, the orchestral suites, the harpsichord concertos, the violin concertos, and concertos for various instruments were made between 1979 and 1984, so they are a mix of ADD and DDD recordings.

Called ‘Ouvertüren' in Germany, because they began with a large-scale overture à la française, Bach's Suites for orchestra offer a unique synthesis of the French and the Italian styles. The Leipzig Cantor did not content himself with a mere set of amiable dances for his ‘Collegium Musicum': he revived the genre in his own manner, accenting the contrasts, refining the orchestration, and introducing a hitherto unknown contrapuntal element. Two centuries later these admirable orchestral works continue to represent an indispensable treasure of the Baroque.

Listening to this irresistibly joyful and magnificently musical set of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos and Orchestral Suites, one is immediately struck by two thoughts. First, Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan have been wasting their time concentrating on Bach's dour cantatas, and second, Bach himself was wasting his time writing his melancholy church music when he could have been composing infinitely more cheerful secular music. While Suzuki and his crew have turned in superlatively performed, if spectacularly severe recording of the cantatas, they sound just as virtuosic and vastly more comfortable here.