Project Harmonia Mundi - Part 4

Trade secrets. This unusual recording offers you the chance to look into the ‘composer’s workshop’ with four concertos by Bach: two of them are his own transcriptions of earlier works (the fourth Brandenburg and the Concerto for two violins), while the other two are highly convincing reconstructions of original concertos, still based on Bach’s own transcriptions!

A great work of festive music.
The Christmas Oratorio is the sublime outcome of a vast project that Bach completed between December1734 and January 1735. This monumental fresco inspired by the history of the Nativity for narrators, soloists, choirs and orchestra comprises no fewer than six sections, each one a huge cantata. The general tone, reconciling the most daring polyphony with the spirit of Christmas and a moving naiveté, endows this masterpiece with an extraordinary freshness.

So skillfully does Bach handle the three elements of violin, harpsichord, and gamba, testing the relationship between them in every conceivable way, that these pieces might be seen as one of the final and fullest flowerings of the trio sonata form, an apotheosis of the genre.

There was a time when notions of copyright did not exist. To reuse other people’s music without owing them anything was more than just the norm: it was a form of homage. There was a time when, with a view to acquiring new skills, Bach transcribed for organ or harpsichord concertos by Vivaldi, Torelli and the Marcello brothers; and these fine transcriptions led directly to one of his own masterpieces, the Italian Concerto. Paradoxically, this exercise was much later to be seen as betrayal, sacrilege, a crime against the integrity of the work. A plague on censors! Today’s musicians know that to perform Bach on the piano is not to betray him – on the contrary. Alexandre Tharaud has already successfully explored the harpsichord suites of Rameau on a Steinway; here, when he revisits the transpositions of the great Johann Sebastian Bach on the piano, it is enough to make us quite giddy with pleasure!

Keyboard virtuoso Richard Egarr offers inspired readings from among Bach’s most familiar solo works (Italian Concerto, Chromatic Fantasia & Fugue) and rarely heard transcriptions of Vivaldi, plus his own completion of the unfinished Fugue in C minor, BWV 906.

Towards the highest summits
The Mass in B minor is the consecration of a whole life: started in 1733 for 'diplomatic' reasons, it was finished in the very last years of Bach's life, when he had already gone blind. This monumental work is a synthesis of every stylistic and technical contribution the Cantor of Leipzig made to music. But it is also the most astounding spiritual encounter between the worlds of Catholic glorification and the Lutheran cult of the cross. No other Mass, no other Requiem was ever again to reach such sublime summits. Instead of suffering from its heterogeneous qualities, the Mass in B minor turns them into the ultimate and most perfect expression of an architectural form that was 'dreamed, imagined, and finally realised' (A. Basso).

Lutheran masses.
In comparison to his 200 or so cantatas, the masses take up only a minimal portion of Bach’s enormous output; they are dominated, of course, by the celebrated (and Catholic) Mass in B minor, which Cantus Cölln recorded in 2003. Contrary to what their Latin titles might seem to imply, the four short masses, composed in Leipzig between 1735 and 1744, belong to the sphere of the Reformed liturgy, and are therefore limited to the Kyrie and Gloria, with just six separate numbers in each mass.

J. S. Bach’s seven harpsichord concertos and the “Triple” concerto BWV 1044 span the total range of Baroque experience: from the tempestuous élan of BWV 1052, through the disquiet and anger of BWV 1056, to the joy and elation of BWV 1055. Richard Egarr and The Academy of Ancient Music, led by Andrew Manze, present these masterpieces in radically fresh, intimate readings charged with dramatic intensity.

To the glory of God and the Burgomaster
Bach's appointment as director musices of the city of Leipzig in 1723 brought with it, among his other functions, the duty of providing an annual liturgical cantata specifically intended for performance during the ceremony of the opening of the session of the new Municipal Council. At least twelve such cantatas were written during the long years he spent in the pious town, of which no more than a third have survived intact. The almost martial accents of Preise, Jerusalem, den Herrn, the invocation of prosperity and blessing of Gott, man lobet dich in der Stille and the astonishing parodies of the third Partita for solo violin in Wir danken dir, Gott - the three cantatas on this recording - are all somewhat unabashed combinations of the glorification of God and municipal pride.