“A great joy”: this is how Masaaki Suzuki considers this, his second recording of the St. Matthew’s Passion, made twenty years after the first one, in the Saitama Arts Theatre in Japan in April 2019 for the BIS label. A great opportunity to revisit the work, as in the elapsed time, the conductor and his orchestra have nearly completely recorded Bach’s choral music, including the complete masses and secular and sacred cantatas. As is his custom, Suzuki works with European soloists for this new recording, like the splendid young German tenor Benjamin Bruns, playing the stupendous part of the Evangelist. There are other familiar soloists that feature here, such as Carolyn Sampson, Damien Guillon, Makoto Sakurada and Christian Immler. There is nothing monumental about this new intimate and refined version, which follows the fateful narrative with great sobriety. There is nevertheless a fervent level of impulse, as well as a certain innocence within this resolutely pared back Lutheran perspective - there is never any real search for theatricality. The exceptional instrumental quality of the soloists of the Bach Collegium Japan and the soft touches of the two choral ensembles is also worth highlighting. © François Hudry / Qobuz

The "Bach Pilgrimage" of conductor John Eliot Gardiner, with his English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, is among the most ambitious musical projects of recent decades: a concert tour devoted to Bach's complete church cantatas, matched to the liturgical year in something like real time, and passing through the cities where Bach lived and worked but also stopping in churches in other countries. The funding itself was a minor miracle. His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, is the first name listed, but corporations also kicked in, and individual donors could help out with single concerts along the way. The recordings designate themselves as live; actually, they represent final dress rehearsals rather than concert performances, but they have that edge-of-the-chair quality that dress rehearsals sometimes attain, and they're not marred by coughs, creaking pews, and doors opening and closing. The performances are, furthermore, not perfect. In this two-disc set of Epiphany cantatas, rounded out by the motet Jesu, meine Freude, soprano Joanne Lunn is severely challenged by the devilish (sorry, JSB, but that's the right word) quick-triplet mode mixtures in the "Wirf, mein Herze" aria in the Mein Gott, wie lang, ach lange?, BWV 155 (CD 1, track 4). Gardiner's overall treatment of the cantatas is quiet and reverential, and he can go to extremes in pursuit of this ideal; the bass aria "Ächzen und erbärmlich Weinen" (Groaning and pitiable weeping) in the cantata Meine Seufzer, meine Tränen, BWV 13 (My sighs, my tears) is taken at a grindingly slow tempo and extended to a 10-and-a-half-minute length. Gardiner justifies this decision with reference to symbols of the Cross he finds in the score -- always a risky business. Any complaints one might have, however, are swept aside by the great virtue of these performances -- the intensity of the performers' response to the texts. Gardiner seems to put himself in Bach's shoes as Bach sought to find individual meaning in well-worn Lutheran texts. His observations, expressed in a sort of road diary that serves as booklet notes, are acute, and people will be reading them a century hence to find out what Bach meant to listeners of the early twenty-first century. (They're admirably personal and colloquial -- if you've ever wondered how to say "hair shirt" in German, you can find out from the booklet here.) What's really remarkable, however, is the way Gardiner has involved his performers in his creative response to the texts. The performance of Jesu, meine Freude at the end of disc 2 is one of the very best ever recorded, with absolute conviction from the Monteverdi Choir in singing lines like "Lass den Satan wittern" (Let Satan storm). Those who approach Bach's cantatas from a specifically religious perspective may well find these performances definitive, and they are, from any perspective at all, documents of extraordinary commitment and musical enthusiasm. © TiVo

"The St. Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach is one of the greatest works in the history of music. Whenever I study this epochal composition, I always ask myself the question: How can a work of music, which is performed each year in thousands of performances, has been scientifically and artistically interpreted for decades, and worshiped for centuries, remain a new, contemporary, and at the same time universal and supreme idea? It can be achieved if that which is defined as established and comprehensive, and appears or is accepted as unshakeable, is set in motion without capping the connections to the work itself and its musical- historical, intellectual and theological foundations", says Hans-Christoph Rademann about one of the monumental sacred works of music history. In November 2020, Rademann and the Gächinger Cantorey ensemble and chorus, together with an extraordinary group of soloists, set out to lend a new and fresh perspective to Bach's timeless masterpiece of raging choirs, intimate chorales, and emotionally charged arias, which, with its drama and pictorial quality, allows the listener to experience the well-known Passion story again and again as something completely new and unheard-of. © Accentus Music

What is it about volume 26 of John Eliot Gardiner's cycle of the complete Bach cantatas that makes it special? Is it the works? All seven cantatas on this two-disc set have their individual beauties, but the last -- Ich liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte, BWV 174 -- starts with a magnificent Sinfonia based on the opening movement of the Third Brandenburg Concerto, only with oboes, horns, and organ, and thus has the added benefit of instant recognition. Is it the performances? As always, Gardiner obtains a bright tone and a robust performance from the English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverdi Choir, an approach that brings out the best in these seven mostly celebratory works. Or is it the sometimes out-of-tune singing and the occasionally out-of-tune playing? Most of the soloists are fine -- particularly cheerful soprano Lisa Larsson and chesty alto Nathalie Stutzmann -- and some are excellent -- especially soulful tenor Christoph Genz -- but they, along with the choir, do sometimes slip out of tune. And while most of the playing is first rate -- check out the clarity of the strings and the taste of the continuo -- there are moments when the strings or the winds slid out of tune. Still, since these are all live performances recorded with amazing clarity and presence at Holy Trinity Church in Long Melford in June 2000, these flaws are fairly insignificant compared with the performances' many strengths, and anyone who has enjoyed Gardiner's joyful and direct approach to Bach's cantatas will surely enjoy volume 26. © TiVo

With this set of 12 cantatas, a few of them quite short, Dutch historical-instrument conductor Ton Koopman approaches the end of his monumental traversal of the complete Bach cantata corpus. The cantatas here mostly date from the last two decades of Bach's life. By this time Bach had cantatas from earlier cycles ready for most occasions pertaining to the liturgical year. Several of the works here were written for special occasions -- weddings in at least two cases. The orchestration for the most part is large and varied, with several pieces including trumpets and tympani; the Cantata No. 195, "Dem Gerechten muß das Licht," BWV 195, features a dazzling array of strings, oboe, oboe d'amore, transverse flutes, horns, trumpets, bassoon, timpani, and continuo. The result is that these pieces play to the strengths of Koopman's interpretations: the warm, flawless blend of the Amsterdam Baroque Choir and the sharp differentiation of the instruments within what remains a big, festive sound overall. The famous cantata in this group is the Cantata No. 140, "Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme," BWV 140, with its "Sleepers Awake" chorale and its lovely variations on a pastoral theme. Sample the opening chorus (CD 2, track 1) for an idea of what you can expect in the various large choruses in the lesser-known cantatas in the set: each has its nice textural touches, and not a one gets lost in Koopman's expert interpretation. Hear the "Welt, ade, ich bin dein müde" (World, goodbye, I am tired of you) movement of the Cantata No. 158, "Der Friede sei mit dir," BWV 158, for an example of Koopman at his best: this odd combination of a bass aria with mantra-like interjections of the chorale from the choir's sopranos would throw a lesser conductor. The soloists in this set are also unusually effective. Soprano Sandrine Piau's voice is unhampered by the high pitch Koopman employs, and her soaring lyricism makes an effective foil for the unusual, rather English horn-like timbre of the alto of Bogna Bartosz. There is something a bit cool in Koopman's readings; for deep humanistic insights into Bach's music, the evolving cantata set by John Eliot Gardiner may be preferable. But in the public, festive music heard here, this lion of the historical-performance movement is hard to beat. © TiVo

In this, the sixth volume of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach cantata pilgrimage, Gardiner, the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists, and soloists present three cantatas for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity (recorded live in the Jakobskirche in Köthen on September 10, 2000) and three cantatas for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity (recorded a week later in the Dreikönigskirche in Frankfurt). As previously in this distinguished series, Gardiner's approach is clearly devotional: no point goes unmade in these purposefully religious works. From the opening Lobe den Herrn, meine Seele, BWV 69a, with its festive opening movement to the closing Allein zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 33, with its affecting final chorale harmonization, this disc is compelling and persuasive. In both locations, SDG's sound is startlingly clear yet amazingly atmospheric. © TiVo

Johann Sebastian Bach has made the reputation of Café Zimmermann ever since the ensemble was formed in 1999. This new recording presents the music of the Kantor from a different angle, that of the notebooks in which musicians wrote down pieces and movements they particularly liked. This recording brings together works composed by Bach in the late 1740s which may be described as intimate in character, including the famous Trio Sonata from his Musical Offering. The Baroque idiom of this "experimental" sonata is contextualised by the innovative style developed by his son Carl Philipp Emanuel in one of his own trio sonatas. A number of arias by J. S. Bach are also presented here with exclusively instrumental forces. Under the direction of violinist Pablo Valetti and harpsichordist Céline Frisch, the ensemble even ventures into Mozartian territory with the Aria and Fugue, K. 404a, taken from two pieces by Bach that Mozart himself had annotated and arranged in his own musical notebook. Finally, a chorale that Bach was particularly fond of, a three-part fugue played here by harpsichord and flute. Carl Philipp Emanuel had it printed at the end of his father’s musical testament, The Art of Fugue: "Before thy throne I now appear". © Alpha Classics