With its forty-five chorale preludes, the Orgelbüchlein bears witness to a mastery of the art of improvisation on the organ, as the congregation heard it at the time before singing the hymn in its turn. It was a tempting experiment to revive this primary function: by collaborating with the combined forces of the Ensemble Vocal Bergamasque and the Maîtrise de Notre-Dame de Paris, Benjamin Alard gives the "little organ book" its full significance and expressive power. © harmonia mundi

Are these the best, the deepest, the profoundest -- in a word, the greatest -- recordings of these four Bach cantatas ever made? What a silly question! Indeed, what an utterly beside-the-point question and surely a question that neither the conductor, the performers, or even the composer would ever have thought to ask. The real question is: are these recordings musically, emotionally, and spiritually honest recordings, that is, do they capture the true essence of the works? And the answer to that question is a grateful "yes." While John Eliot Gardiner has not always been ideally matched with the repertoire he's recorded -- does anyone recall his Janácek Sinfonetta or Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances? -- he has always been ideally suited to the music of the Baroque -- who cannot recall his Monteverdi Vespers or his Handel Messiah? -- and his series of Bach cantatas has been as good as the best things he's ever recorded. In these performances with the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists recorded in New York on Christmas 2000, Gardiner has created recordings that may or may not be in the same league with Richter, Harnoncourt, Leonhardt, or Koopman but that are certainly absolutely musically, emotionally, and spiritually as one with the works. The beauty of the melodies, the clarity of the part writing, the rightness of the harmonies, the lightness of the rhythms, the color of the scoring? All are as one with the music. The joy, the sorrow, the exaltation, the anguish, the excitement? All are as one with the texts. The awe, the dread, the glory, the wonder, the bliss? All are as one with Bach's fusion of music and texts. Are these then the best recordings of these four Bach cantatas ever made? Does it really matter? Anyone who loves these cantatas will love this disc. © TiVo

Download not available

The great Masaaki Suzuki's traversal of Bach's keyboard music is well underway, and several attractions have become clear. In general, though, the interpretations are clearly characteristic of the musician who recorded all of Bach's cantatas; he is a bit less concerned with a pearly surface and a bit more with direct expression. In works for organ, he has shown a willingness to delve into period instruments, and the one here, the 1737 Christoph Treutmann organ of Stiftskirche St. Georg, Grauhof in Germany's Lower Saxony region, is a real find. It is an instrument that Bach might have played; at the very least, it is similar to the ones he knew, and it brings the organ music on this release alive. The instrument's occasional clanking noises do not detract from, and arguably even enhance, its remarkable variety of colors; the delicate stops here (try Vom Himmel kam der Engel Schaar) are glorious. Suzuki is willing to take a bit of time to bring out these colors; there is nothing too radical, but there are subtle adjustments to the tempo throughout that define the profile of each little ornamented chorale, and all the performances are vivid. Hear the swirly effects of In dulci jubilo, BWV 608. The pieces, except for an entr'acte prelude and fugue, are associated with the holiday season. This album was released in the summer of 2023; it may not have been intended as a Christmas album, but it would make a wonderful purchase at that time.© James Manheim /TiVo

You'll need your latest smartphone if you want to understand anything about the latest albums by the wacky German organist Jörg Halubek. Under the GPS coordinates of the places and instruments frequented by Bach, we see Halubek, on the covers of his Bach complete works undertaken since 2019 for the Berlin Classics label, armed with a large black umbrella under a radiant sky, walking around with a cheerful face. Of course, the name Halubek is already a bit of an in-joke itself, if one considers the journey to Lübeck (!) that Bach made in 1705, on foot, to meet Dietrich Buxtehude, the greatest German composer of his time.More seriously, Jörg Halubek is a complete musician. An organist and harpsichordist, he also studied period performance practice with Jesper Christensen and Andrea Marcon at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, before forming his own ensemble, il Gusto Barocco, with whom he has made several recordings.This new album is devoted to early works composed in Lüneburg and Arnstadt. It contains the Orgelbüchlein ("Little Organ Book"), the famous collection of forty-six organ chorales composed by Bach between 1708 and 1717 and published in the mid-19th century, a must for all organist apprentices worldwide. The other side of this album is devoted to the Partitas BWV 770 and 766 to 768, in which Bach's unique personality is already apparent. © François Hudry/Qobuz

Conductor John Eliot Gardiner, said England's Independent newspaper, "has had the last laugh" -- Vol. 1 of his Bach cantata series was named Record of the Year at the 2005 Classic FM Gramophone Awards in London, after the big Deutsche Grammophon label pulled out of the project and dropped Gardiner just before it got underway in 2000. No doubt a bit of gloating is appropriate along with justified satisfaction in a tough job well done -- Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists undertook a "Bach cantata pilgrimage," singing all of Bach's cantatas on their liturgically appropriate dates while making a grand tour of acoustically appropriate European churches, many of them with links to the original circumstances in which Bach worked. The recordings, Gardiner said, were "a corollary of the concerts, not their raison d'être" prior to each night's concert, engineers recorded the final rehearsal in situ. By the time these recordings were made in London, the concert series was well under way, and, in the words of bass Dietrich Henschel, the performers "had become spiritually familiar with one another." The results, issued on Gardiner's own SDG label, fully live up to the awards hype. Gardiner's interpretations, though they fall under the historical-performance classification, are personal, subjective, dramatic, and romantic. The program naturally coheres thanks to the common origins of the works in the phases of the liturgical year around which Bach organized his thinking (six cantatas are presented on two discs, three for the Feast of St. John the Baptist in mid-June and three for the first Sunday after Trinity), and every element of the sumptuous booklet presentation contributes to an appreciation of Bach's religious language, as audiences in German churches of the eighteenth century would have understood it. So Gardiner has indeed had the last laugh. But perhaps he would be the first to concede that the difficult birth of this project helped him push classical music toward its future, and even that the music is perhaps better, more urgent, than it might otherwise have been. In place of what would have been a series of implacably standardized albums on Deutsche Grammophon, we will now have releases that are individual, committed, and free. Gardiner's liner notes are taken from journals he wrote during the Bach pilgrimage, and they help bring home the immediacy and excitement of this project. The next step, as recordings like this move online, will be to turn this kind of journal into a blog. The old superstructure of the classical recording industry is collapsing into ruin, but this recording provides some of the clearest testimony yet that new and exciting small enterprises will fill the void. © TiVo

This two-disc set is volume 21 in conductor John Eliot Gardiner's series of recordings of Bach's complete sacred cantatas -- a project dubbed "The Bach Cantata Pilgrimage" because each disc preserves a complete concert given at different locations around the world. On the first disc, recorded at King's College Chapel in Cambridge on March 5, 2000, Gardiner and his Monteverdi Choir and his period instrument English Baroque Soloists present four cantatas composed for Quinquagestima Sunday. On the second disc, recorded at Walpole St. Peter in Norfolk on March 26, 2000, Gardiner and his forces present three cantatas composed for the Annunciation and Palm Sunday. For fans of the conductor, his return to Bach's music after years of exploring more recent repertoire -- remember his recording of Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances? -- will be a return to the music he does best. And it's true that Gardiner's Bach performances have a lightness of touch and a depth of feeling that few of his recordings of later music can match. But the greatest virtue of Gardiner's Bach performances is their wholly devotional character. Whatever the cantata and whomever the vocal soloists, Gardiner's Bach is performed, as it were, on its knees with hands folded and head bent. So while those disinclined to credit the conductor with much feeling for later music may be tempted to dismiss his Bach for the same flaw, they will find little to object to here where, as the notes indicate, everything is done Soli Deo Gloria (For the sole glory of God). Monteverdi Production's sound is full, warm, deep, and detailed. © TiVo