Ton Koopman

Although Ton Koopman's fine Bach cantata series, begun in the mid-1990s, was abandoned by Warner Classics/Erato in 2001, the conductor managed to resume the 22-volume edition's issue through his own label, Antoine Marchand (a sub-label of Challenge Classics). And while distribution in the U.S. hasn't always been steady, that question seems to be resolved and we can expect to enjoy the remaining volumes as they appear over the next few years. This Volume 2 is by no means a "new release", but since Classicstoday.com last visited the series in June, 2003, with a review of Volume 1 (type Q6613 in Search Reviews), we thought we'd pick up where we left off. As collectors of these cantatas already know, Koopman initially released 12 of the 22 volumes with Erato, so if you already own any of these, you don't need to consider the Challenge Classics versions since they are identical...

–David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Under the Antoine Marchand (that's Ton Koopman in French, or Anthony Merchant in English) imprint of the Challenge Classics label, Dutch early music veteran Ton Koopman recording the large corpus of surviving works by Dietrich Buxtehude, inspired by the tercentary of the composer's death in 1707. All initial indications are that few other musicians could have done this at all, and probably no one could have done it as well.

One of the seemingly endless possibilities for programming Bach's cantatas, this 2008 Antoine Marchand disc drawn from Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir's survey of the complete surviving cantatas joins five works featuring either alto or tenor soloists. The first two works here feature Polish alto Bogna Bartosz, the third German alto Andreas Scholl, the fourth German tenor Christoph Prégardien, and the fifth – a single aria for an unspecified occasion – Bartosz again. As in all Koopman's Bach recordings, these are always entirely successful if not entirely predictable performances. Organist Koopman is a canny Bach conductor, leading performances from the keyboard that combines both the spirituality and humanity of Bach's music.

In evaluating a Bach cantata recording, there are so many variables to consider--programming choices; quality and type of soloists; tempos and balances among soloists, orchestra, and chorus; quality of choir and orchestra; use of alternate arias (or voices for a particular aria); version of the score (where more than one exists); instrumentation (period or modern instruments; configuration of continuo); and of course, the quality of the recorded sound--that comparisons between different recordings often become more descriptions than critiques. No matter how "good" a performance is, if you don't like period instruments you won't like Herreweghe or Koopman; likewise, if a certain countertenor soloist bugs you, you'll be unlikely to enjoy a cantata in which that singer is prominently featured, no matter how wonderful the work's other movements sound. On the other hand, if you like Koopman - or Herreweghe, both of whom are the most interpretively consistent among period-instrument practitioners (Rilling fits that bill in the modern-instrument category; "periodists" Gardiner and Harnoncourt are notoriously unpredictable) - then you'll likely be pretty satisfied with most of their efforts in this repertoire...

David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Ton Koopman is considered to be one of the world's leading experts in the performance of music of the baroque period and particularly that of J.S. Bach. As a harpsichord player and director of the group he founded, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir, Ton Koopman has been a regular guest at leading concert halls in Vienna, London, Berlin, Brussels, Madrid, Rome, Salzburg, Tokyo and Osaka. Between 1994 and 2004 he conducted and recorded all the existing cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, and this series received many international awards, among them the BBC Music Magazine Award in 2008.

The marvellous Ton Koopman plays Bach's complete works for organ in wonderful performances full of power, passion, and grace! These digital recordings were made in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1998, and 1999.