Daniel Taylor is a Canadian countertenor, one of a group that has come on the scene in recent years and given promise that soon the countertenor voice will be considered less an exotic specialty and more a generally cultivated voice type. Taylor, perhaps more than other countertenors active today, sounds as though he is engaging in a natural kind ...
This collection of post-Elizabethan melancholy risks being overly ambitious, for it tries to pursue two innovative goals. First, it mixes songs and poetry of the period; it is not the only recording to have done so, but it is likely to be the first one that attendees at the Stratford Festival, say, run across on the rack. Second, it tries to ...
This disc is the debut entry in a full cycle of Bach's cantatas to come from Canada's Montreal Baroque historical performance ensemble. Conductor Eric Milnes opts for the controversial approach of having just one voice per part -- the four soloists, joined together -- in the choral movements, with no choir in sight. The result is a clean, sparse ...
In this volume recorded on April 23-25, 2000, in the Georgenkirche in Eisenach -- the town of Bach's birth and the church of his baptism -- John Eliot Gardiner has programmed two cantatas for Easter Sunday -- Christ lag in Todesbandend (Christ lies in the Bonds of Death) (BWV 4) and Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde jubilieret! (The Heavens Laugh! The ...
If the idea of six sorrowful sacred cantatas written by four pre-Bach German composers appeals to you, this disc by the Collegium Vocale Gent under the direction of Philippe Herreweghe is the disc for you. Opening with three works by Lübeck organist Franz Tunder (1614-1667) -- Dominus illuminatio mea, Wend' ab deinen Zorn, and an Ein feste Burg ...
In a time when Bach cantatas are recorded in big bunches, it's a pleasure to find a single-disc grouping, beautifully selected and performed. Weinen, Klagen... (Weeping, Lamentation...) presents three cantatas with a common theme and plan. The theme of lamentation in the face of suffering and death transmuted into the comfort of Christ is a common ...
For the First Sunday after Easter, John Eliot Gardiner and his Bach cantata pilgrimage took themselves to the Johann Sebastian-Bach-Kirche in Arnstadt, Thuringia -- so named because it was the 18-year-old Bach's first professional post -- to perform and record four cantatas on April 29 and 30, 2000: Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (Unto Thee, Lord, ...
Danish-German composer Dietrich Buxtehude has an extensive output of vocal music in addition to his far better known canon of organ music. The vocal music is more obscure in that it is such a mixed bag. The oratorios he wrote have gone lost, many pieces relate directly to the organ music in a way that is difficult to divine now and some of the ...
Fruits de la Passion is a sampler disc, presenting music that was heard at the Montreal Baroque Music Festival in 2003 and 2004. It's not clear why it is labeled with the date 2005. Perhaps it was intended to be sold at the 2005 festival but was released later for general sale. In any event, it's an invitation to the festival, held in the Old ...
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