The labels lately established by performing organizations have mostly been devoted to new releases, but there is a lot to be said for using them to resurrect historical performances and recordings. These tend to be ones that have hung in people's memories for years, well after newer recordings have become available. There couldn't be a better example than this, the first historical release from the Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings label. It reproduces a 1984 live performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah, Op. 70 (as Elias, in the original German) from the Nationaltheater München, with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester conducted by Wolfgang Sawallisch and the Chor des städtischen Musikvereins zu Düsseldorf. (The latter got involved because the Bayerischer Staatsopernchor was unavailable, but the choir acquits itself very well, unsurprisingly inasmuch as Mendelssohn himself was one of its former directors.) Sawallisch was noted for his way with Mendelssohn, to which he brought a noble Germanic tinge that makes a nice contrast with the usual English performances. He never did better than here, and upon hearing that tapes of this performance had been preserved, he is said to have exclaimed, "Thank God they're safe!" The soloists, led by baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the title role and tenor Peter Schreier as Obadiah, are superb. Another attraction is the hardbound booklet, delving deep into Mendelssohn's philosophical place in German society (really philosophical -- Hegel and his dialectic come into it). The live sound from 1984 is impressive indeed, with crowd noise kept to an absolute minimum in a superb display of discipline. A wonderful historical reissue that catches the intense drama in Mendelssohn's oratorio.© James Manheim /TiVo

Read the graphics carefully: no motets by Johann Sebastian Bach (except for one piece generally attributed to Johann Christoph Bach, but possibly the work of J.S.) are included here. Instead there are works by three of J.S. Bach's ancestors in the 17th century, including the very first composer in the 250-year Bach musical clan, Johann Bach (1604-1673). It's usually the Bach sons whose music is recorded, and all three of these composers qualify as obscure. Considering the fact that J.S. Bach set himself the task of compiling this music and obviously admired some of it, there will be reason enough for many buyers to acquire this Outhere release. There are certainly flashes of the characteristic Bach genius in a few of these works. Try the Johann Michael Bach motet Halt, was du hast (CD 1, track 7), and note the complexity with which the chorale Jesu, meine Freude is treated: it's hard not to think that the younger Bach had this in mind when he approached the chorale himself in the motet medium. The music on the album traces the passage of Italian styles across Germany while remaining firmly rooted in the chorale tradition, and the composers' flexibility in combining these elements must have had a general impact on the most talented Bach of them all. The performances of the small Vox Luminis choir with the Scorpio Collectief -- a quintet of winds and brasses with organ continuo -- are generally sparse, with one voice per part. This is questionable in music that took the great cathedral choirs of Venice for its performance model, but it's listenable and puts across the stylistic distinctions effectively. Recommended for Bach fans.© TiVo

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

Organ player and harpsichordist, titular player of the Aubertin organ of the Saint-Louis-en l'Île church in Paris, where he regularly plays Bach in concert, Benjamin Alard is an unstoppable talent. Passionate about the world of Johann Sebastian Bach, this young man, "reserved, with an understated sense of humour", has undertaken a complete recording of the Cantor's keyboard works for harmonia mundi. The project is vast, and has never before been completed by a single musician. Benjamin Alard's very original approach is based on the idea of taking on this vast catalogue split into fourteen chapters, following the timeline of the composer's life, describing his influences, his travels and his professional choices. Every volume is to be thought of as a series of episodes retracing the life and works of the Cantor of Leipzig. This first volume paints a picture of "the young heir", whose music is still very much a tribute to his predecessors, such as Georg Böhm, Johann Kuhnau, Tomaso Albinoni, Johann Pachelbel, Girolamo Frescobaldi, Louis Marchand and Johann Jakob Froberger. The instruments used for this complete recording have been selected, thankfully, with great care. Recorded in May 2017, this first volume uses the Silberman organ in Sainte-Aurélie in Strasbourg, a superb instrument built in 2017, which benefited from a magnificent restoration in 2015, to mark its tricentenary. As for the harpsichord, it is a modern instrument produced by manufacturer Émile Jobin, inspired by models from Ruckers and Dulcken. A young man of his times, Benjamin Alard accompanies this complete works with an original idea: every work is recorded and published separately on streaming and download sites (like Qobuz), along with videos on social media. © François Hudry/Qobuz

The Bach cantata pilgrimage of conductor John Eliot Gardiner, with his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, began on Christmas of 1999 and continued through the year 2000. At first the musicians retraced some of Bach's steps through northern Germany, then performed in a variety of churches in England and northwestern Europe, matching the cantatas as closely as possible to the events in the liturgical year for which they were intended. It was an impressive logistical undertaking, supported financially by the Prince of Wales, among others, and the handsomely packaged live recordings that emerged from the project have taken several years to appear. This one is an excellent example of why they were worth the wait. There's nothing so radical about Gardiner's interpretations; he uses a moderate-sized choir at a time when the cutting-edge favors very small groups or even one voice per part, and his soloists, while more than competent, aren't the sort around whom a performance can be organized, as with some of the recent Bach cantata discs directed by Ton Koopman. Where Gardiner excels is in the pure human understanding of the texts Bach sets and of his response to them. Hear the almost sarcastic tone of the opening bass aria of the Cantata No. 181, Leichtgesinnte Flattergeister, BWV 181 (CD 2, track 6, the only possible complaint against the packaging is that there is no full tracklist other than the German and English texts of the cantatas themselves), or the militantly anti-Catholic and anti-"Turkish" (it's not only the Jews who get rough treatment from Bach) Cantata No. 126, "Erhalte uns, Herr, bei deinem Wort," BWV 126. Here Gardiner pushes tenor James Gilchrist to the absolute limit in the at first deceptively prayerful but soon over-the-top aria "Sende deine Macht von oben" (CD 2, track 12); Gardiner's conception of the overall mood rules the interpretation. He expands on those conceptions, taking into account historical and musicological matters, in booklet notes, based on his own journals during the trip, and these are in many cases worth the purchase price by themselves; they offer exceptional syntheses of technical and critical perspectives. Gardiner's Bach series isn't the most "perfect" available, but it may be the most profound. The sound in both these locations (one in the Netherlands, one in Britain) is clear, aided perhaps by backup rehearsal recordings made in case of fluffed notes or coughing audiences. © TiVo

Following its previous album "Evoke", with the pianist Timothy End, the Ferio Saxophone Quartet returns with this exciting and innovative programme of works for saxophone quartet and voices. Founded and directed by Freddie Crowley, the Corvus Consort is a vocal ensemble based in the UK, which draws its members from a pool of young singers in the early stages of their professional careers. The project was inspired by the Quartet’s 2018 recording, "Revive", an album of baroque transcriptions. Freddie Crowley writes: "Heinrich Schütz in the preface to his Geistliche Chor-Music, of 1648 (from which four of the items on this album are drawn) wrote: “You can perform some of these pieces [...] with an organ or instruments on the choral parts along with a full choir”. The instruments he had in mind were not saxophones, of course, which would not be invented for another 200 years, but I suspect that he might have found them an excellent choice! Schütz intended his collection to be a demonstration of good composition without basso continuo, focussing on counterpoint as the foundation of compositional technique. It is these contrapuntal properties that make his and other baroque and Renaissance music so infinitely adaptable into new forms – transitioning effortlessly onto the saxophone, for example – and the same properties that underpin the four contemporary works on our album, all inspired in their own different ways by music of the Renaissance". © Chandos

You'll need your latest smartphone if you want to understand anything about the latest albums by the wacky German organist Jörg Halubek. 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. Underneath the GPS coordinates of the places and instruments frequented by Bach, we see Jörg Halubek from the back, looking out over the endless sea as in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich.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 volume of his Bach complete works, "Bach Organ Landscapes", undertaken since 2019 for the Berlin Classics label, takes us this time to Hamburg.Together with the Toccata in C, BWV 564, the works on this album represent the influence of the North German style on Bach's music. There are also some works composed before the trip to Lübeck and chorale preludes from his apprenticeship in Lüneburg. This project is based on ten historical organ builders who played a role in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. © François Hudry/Qobuz

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