Just when you think that Ton Koopman's magnificent cycle of the complete cantatas of Bach can't get any better, on the last disc of the last volume, it does with a reconstruction of Bach's fragmentary Cantata 193 Ihr Tore zu Zion by Koopman himself. After 19 volumes of three discs apiece, Koopman has proved himself to be perhaps the current ...
Embodying the highest ideals of the Enlightenment, Die Jahreszeiten is surely Haydn's supreme masterpiece and the greatest secular choral-orchestral work of the second half of the eighteenth century. It's pantheism at its grandest and the pathetic fallacy at its most glorious, with the whole of nature given voices to sing God's praises. It's ...
There are those who enjoy hearing Brahms' two sets of Liebeslieder-Walzer performed by a choir and those who enjoy hearing them sung by a quartet, and rarely do the two factions agree. For the former, the rich tone, lush ensemble, and broad rhythms of Robert Shaw's 1992 Atlanta Chorus recording are the way to go. For the latter, only the unique ...
A persistent myth about Johann Sebastian Bach is that he recycled his music so often as a time saving measure. If one strikes a comparison to his contemporary Georg Philipp Telemann, however, it is clear that recycling music was not necessarily an easier way to go for a composer of the German Baroque, as Telemann seldom recycled much of anything, ...
Mozart's arrangement of Handel's Messiah, made in 1789, relates to his involvement in the circle of musical connoisseurs surrounding the Baron Gottfried van Swieten, Viennese nobleman and aficionado of the monuments of Baroque music. It is, as the booklet here aptly puts it, a "cover version" (the German participle, charmingly enough, is "gecovert ...
In place of the usual jumbled compilation discs, Harmonia Mundi has collected some of its recent Haydn releases into something entirely new: a survey of Haydn's career, in Spanish and English, contained in a hardbound 80-page booket with numerous full-color artworks from Haydn's time and other illustrations. The writing by Charles Johnston is ...
The Seasons today is less well known than Haydn's other late oratorio, The Creation. In it, the aged Haydn seems to try to force pastoral imagery -- a pretty stale set of ideas by the dawn of the nineteenth century -- into a musical language that really laid the foundation of Romanticism. He even complained in a letter of having to compose "French ...
Mendelssohn devoted a significant amount of energy to religious choral music, but the only piece well known to modern audiences is the oratorio Elijah. Fans of that work should be interested in these four Psalm settings, which are strikingly similar to the music of Elijah in their musical language and dramatic content. The Psalms recorded here ...
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