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

The "Bach Pilgrimage" of conductor John Eliot Gardiner, with his English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir, was among a most ambitious musical project: a concert tour devoted to Bach's complete church cantatas, played on historical instruments, 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. This recording of Christmas cantatas was made at St. Bartholomew's Church in New York at the end of the precisionists' millennium (in late December 2000). The recordings are designated as live; they actually represent final dress rehearsals rather than concert performances (no coughing this way), but they do have the feel of performances in a live setting. The cover art of this album is striking: a picture of a baby with a dirt-streaked face, wrapped in a tattered blanket over a wool cap. The photo comes from Tibet; the baby is the child of nomadic farmers. The image nicely encapsulates the virtues of Gardiner's entire series, which is second to none in immediacy of impact and engagement with Bach's reaction to the texts. A standout here is Selig ist der Mann, BWV 57 (Blessed is the man), one of those Bach soprano-bass duets representing a dialogue between the soul (the soprano) and Jesus Christ (the bass). The soloists on Gardiner's set are generally not powerhouse singers like those on some of the competing sets, but he often elicits uncannily deep performances from them. Sample the arias by soprano Joanne Lunn in this cantata (track 16, for example). The language is purely operatic: "I would desire to die, to die, if Thou, my Jesus, didst not love me. Yea, if thou wert still to sadden me, I would suffer more than the pain of hell." (The translations here, and elsewhere in Gardiner's series, are annoyingly archaic and really at odds with the aims of the whole project; the German language of Bach's Lutheranism was meant to address congregations in a direct, personal way, not to cow them with archaisms.) But Gardiner and Lunn craft a form of address that is passionate without being operatic. As she answers Jesus' sober pronouncements, a performance of exceptional delicacy and power unfolds. The other cantatas are equally distinctive, and, as Gardiner points out in his wonderfully personal and always readable notes, "Bach has many ways of celebrating the Christmas season in music." The opening Sehet, welch eine Liebe hat uns der Vater erzeiget, BWV 64 (See what kind of love the Father has shown us), is triumphalist and dense, with a splendidly transparent performance of the thorny opening chorus; Süßer Trost, mein Jesus kommt, BWV 151 (Sweet consolation, my Jesus comes), is quietly pastoral; Ich freue mich in dir, BWV 133 (I rejoice in you), is joyful and sunny. This collection of Christmas cantatas makes a fine capstone for a collection of any size of Gardiner's remarkable recordings. © TiVo

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What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is that rarest of rare things: a genuine world-premiere recording of a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach appropriately entitled Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn' (All with Got and Nothing Without). A single-movement cantata setting of a birthday ode for Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxe-Weimar composed in 1713, the work was discovered in the collection of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in June 2005. Searching for source documentation of German music during the Baroque period, musicologist Michael Maul found the anonymous manuscript and immediately identified Bach's characteristically elegant soprano clef sign. In this recording by soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, violinists Alison Bury and Kati Debretzeni, violist Katherine McGillivray, cellist Alison McGillivray, organist Silas John Standage, and lutinist David Miller, Alles mit Gott und nichts ohn' receives a deeply affectionate, profoundly dedicated, and wonderfully musical performance.However, because the work lasts only 12:20 and there were no other Bach premieres to fill up the disc, the remainder of the program consists of 10 movements drawn from various Bach sacred cantatas performed by the Monteverdi Choir, the English Baroque Soloists, and a host of vocal and instrumental soloists all under the direction of John Eliot Gardiner. Although the prospect of 10 seemingly random movements might appear daunting at first, they are in fact arranged into a kind of pastiche cantata of amazing aesthetic effectiveness. More importantly, the tender and intimate interpretations of Gardiner and his forces make each moment of each movement astonishingly emotionally affecting. Monteverdi Productions' sound is warm and close.© TiVo

Bach’s St. John Passion, with its famous opening chorus traversed by shadows and light, is a powerful musical and spiritual reflection. Dramatic, grandiose, complex, resolutely theatrical: there has been no lack of superlatives to describe this supreme masterpiece of western music. Philippe Herreweghe and Collegium Vocale Gent present an accomplished reading that reflects their knowledge of the composer, based on extensive research and deepened by countless concerts. Soloists Krešimir Stražanac and Maximilian Schmitt demonstrate the breadth of their talents in the roles of Jesus and the Evangelist. © Phi

An enemy of fashion and glitz who shunned cocktails and society dinners, Wolfgang Sawallisch was a humble, retiring man whose life was wholly dedicated to music and music alone. Behind what might seem like a well-worn cliché of the "honest man", he was surely one of the greatest artists of his generation. An exceptional pianist, he would sometimes accompany his friend Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau through memorable nights dedicated to Schubert's great cycles. A conductor, he knew the whole repertoire by heart, not only working with an orchestra but also taking to the piano with all the singers. He was a Kapellmeister in the most elevated sense of the term. Between 1971 and 1992 he made his hometown’s Munich Opera (Bayerische Staatsoper) one of the greatest stages in the world, offering performances of an utterly exceptional standard. The gradual seizure of power by producers would put an end to a collaboration which had produced so many unforgettable nights. Sawallisch went on to enjoy a kind of Indian summer as a conductor in his final years, at the head of the Philadelphia Orchestra, where he encountered huge success. First and foremost a performer of Wagner, Wolfgang Sawallisch first made his mark on Bayreuth in his youth, when, in 1962, he conducted landmark performances. The archives of the festival are full of recordings which are slowly being released, whose almost-identical distributions on different dates have sown confusion. Sawallisch conducted Tristan and Isolde with the legendary couple Birgit Nilsson/Wolfgang Windgassen several times, for the festivals in 1957, 1958 and 1959, well before the sensational version conducted by Karl Böhm. This new release covers the night of 26 July 1958 (so it is not a cover of the version released by MYTO of the show on 21 August of the same year). The doomed lovers are given an exceptional treatment under the electrifying baton of a young Sawallisch. © François Hudry/Qobuz

After having explored the remaining cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach’s ancestors, Vox Luminis and Lionel Meunier have undertaken here a recording, accompanied by instrumentals, of these sacred vocal compositions. They are pieces that connect us to the principles of the “spiritual concert” (Geistliches Konzert) and that, through their multi-parted structure, belong to the origins of the sacred genre of the cantata. It was through Johann Sebastian himself that we owe the knowledge of his musical ancestors. Around the age of fifty, he felt the need to collate and retrace his family tree, most likely originating from Hungary where the miller Vitus Bach always brought a cittern with him on his way to grinding wheat. The works of the Bach family presented here represent the first of the sacred German cantatas along with those of Bruhns, Buxtehude and Pachelbel. We can hear here the predecessors’ works that led to one of the first similar works by Johann Sebastian, his cantata “Christ lag in Todesbanden BWV 4”, was considered for a long time as one of the first compositions of its genre. In addition to its striking likeness to the form of cantata eponymous to Pachelbel, this composition contains numerous elements which can notably be traced back to the works of his ancestors. © François Hudry/Qobuz