The Bach Cantata Tour of conductor John Eliot Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists began on Christmas Day 1999 and continued through the year 2000. Its intent was to perform all of Bach's cantatas in their proper places in the liturgical year, at various musically significant locations around Europe. When multiple cantatas for a specific liturgical event survive, the group performed all of them at the concert and was a rich source of insights. Accompanied by excerpts from Gardiner's tour diaries in the handsomely designed booklets, the recordings of the concerts (enhanced only lightly with material from recorded rehearsals) capture the immediacy of live performances; they have a few blemishes and a lot of high points. The set has a cumulative impact, but collecting the whole thing is an expensive proposition. This double disc, capturing performances from Berlin's Gethsemanekirche from New Year's Day and January 2, 2000 (the beginning of the new millennium, if you agree to that way of counting it), may not be the best place to start sampling. The problem is the church's acoustics. Gardiner was asked about them by German interviewers and dutifully reports his retort that Berlin isn't exactly overflowing with suitable churches, and that anyway he liked the church's history of protest (it played a key role at the time of the dissolution of the German Democratic Republic and continues to host peace activism). The engineers do very well, considering; the soloists are easy to hear and understand. But the overall sound is muddy. Even so, the excitement of the millennium-opening concert comes through well, and the remarkable set of soloists Gardiner assembled for the event was in fine form. The standout is tenor James Gilchrist, in the gloriously long aria "Woferne du die edlen Frieden" (track 11), from the Cantata No. 41, Jesu, nun sei gepreiset, BWV 41. Gardiner's booklet notes are almost reason enough to purchase these discs in themselves, and his warm, humanistic interpretations in print are perfect counterparts to his music-making. Recommended, although not the first release to buy from this series. © 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

As in his previous volumes of Bach cantatas in this series, John Eliot Gardiner brings a velvet-gloved, yet iron-fisted approach to Bach. His tempos are supple and his lines are radiant, but the singleness of vision and strength of will are inflexible. As always, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists are both formally and expressively under his firm control. This doesn't mean Gardiner won't allow his vocal soloists considerable interpretive leeway. Soprano Gillian Keith and bass Peter Harvey are marvelously free in the duet between the Soul and Jesus in Tritt auf die Glaubensbahn (Walk the Path of Faith) (BWV 152). But the musical context is wholly Gardiner's. The packaging and production values are, as always, superlative. Recorded live in St. Bartholomew's in New York on the Sunday after Christmas, December 31, 2000, the sound here is ideally balanced, perfectly clear, and utterly natural. Unlike most volumes in this series, however, this is a single-disc package, and so it makes a good introduction to both Bach's cantatas and to Gardiner's approach to them for buyers who would like to test the waters without investing too much money. © TiVo

John Eliot Gardiner literally has a lifetime of intimate familiarity with J.S. Bach's six motets without independent instrumental accompaniment; he reports that as a boy chorister of 11 or 12 he knew the treble lines to all of them. That familiarity is evident in these exceptionally insightful and exceptionally well-sung performances with the Monteverdi Choir. The group lives up to its reputation as being in the very highest echelon of choirs worldwide, singing these especially treacherous works with almost superhuman precision, immaculate tone and balance, and infectious, unguarded passion. The singers handle Bach's exquisitely interwoven counterpoint with apparent ease even at the outrageously fast but emotionally appropriate tempos that Gardiner takes. He avoids the academic rigidity that can easily prevail in performances of counterpoint this intricate by always maintaining a dancing sense of lightness and buoyancy. The performances are also characterized by a warm intimacy. That's due at least in part the choir's remarkable control of dynamics; at its quietest moments the music comes across as an almost hushed whisper. That, in combination with the stellar engineering, creates the impression that the listener is being treated to a private performance by singers nearly close enough to reach out and touch. At the same time there is no sense of crowding and the performers have plenty of room for their singing to ring out brilliantly. Gardiner deploys a small continuo group colorfully but discreetly, offering an ideally balanced underpinning for the choir. Listeners who want to hear these small masterpieces need look no further than these exemplary and thoroughly engaging performances. Highly recommended. © TiVo

Anna Prohaska asked Wolfgang Katschner and the Lautten Compagney at the outset of the coronavirus crisis whether they shouldn’t spontaneously organize a musical get-together in this period. This has now resulted in "Redemption". This is a sequence of music selected solely from Bach cantatas, compiled in keeping with the aforenamed conceptual association. "Redemption" has multiple meanings, for instance: can music give us consolation in times of sickness and crisis; can it open up emotional and contemplative spaces for us; is it redemptive for musicians to be the “instruments” in engendering music and therefore spirituality… ? Besides Anna Prohaska as soloist and three other singers, "Redemption" features a larger group of musicians – around twenty instrumentalists. These musicians serve a dual role: they expertly accompany the arias that Anna Prohaska sings and they also represent the concept of human interaction and a shared collective experience which has been missing during these times. © Alpha Classics

Dietrich Buxtehude is a composer whose reputation is on the rise as performers look beyond the organ works that Bach took a 300-mile stroll to hear, and find a wealth of other riches. This disc, the second of a pair issued by its performers covering the similar repertory, focuses on a group of highly accomplished religious pieces for one or more voices and instruments, without chorus. Unlike Bach during most of his career, Buxtehude was an organist first and foremost; another Lübeck composer took care of the weekly vocal music for church. Though they are presented as a unitary set by the packaging and liner notes, the works on this album are of two sharply different types. Some are for small groups of voices, plus a small string group and continuo. It's easy to imagine these being sung on a Sunday in the living room of a well-established Lübeck merchant family; they have an intimate devotional quality that is familiar to us from Bach's music but that comes through especially nicely in this comparatively unusual setting. Other cantatas are for a solo voice, and these were not sung in anyone's home; they are fiery works for trained singers that Buxtehude must have had at his disposal. Some of the music is in German, the rest in Latin, and Buxtehude seems to have partially inspired Bach's ability to wring dramatic impact out of the sonic characteristics of a single German word. Try singing "nichts" repeatedly and rapidly as the performers here must do; they pull it off perfectly. Four top English soloists -- soprano Emma Kirkby, countertenor Michael Chance, tenor Charles Daniels, and bass Peter Harvey -- plus the Purcell Quartet handle these varied chores well in general. Those who want to hear Kirkby pushed to her limits can do so in the "Gloria Patri" movement of the cantata Dixit Dominus Domino meo, BuxWV 17, and the other soloists except for Harvey also get their athletic moments. Chance plays a bit loose with the pitch but is highly expressive. In the vocal-ensemble cantatas this English group does especially well in structures that point back to the middle seventeenth century -- ground basses, little strophic movements. Their precise style feels a little restrained in the moments where Buxtehude is closest to Bach, but some listeners may like it that way. In any event, this is an above-average exposition of some unfamiliar and quite important music. © TiVo