Bach: Complete Church Cantatas

Advantages: Good background listening
Disadvantages: Odd mixture of music on the Uplifting disc

...'. It is a pleasant track, though it doesn't really stick in my mind afterwards. Uplifting CD 1 Verdi - 'La Donna e Mobile'. Sung here by Alfie Boe, this well known piece comes from the opera Rigoletto. This seems an odd choice for the album. It's cheerful enough I suppose but I can't say that I personally find it uplifting. It strays too far into opera territory for my own tastes but obviously others may enjoy it more. 2 J.S Bach - 'Wachet Auf'. This is one of Bach's cantatas and is an enjoyable choral piece which would have fitted equally well into the Relaxing CD. 3 Grieg - 'In The Hall of the Mountain King'. Another famous tune but a strange choice for the album. Voices 2008 is obviously all about vocal classics, but in this piece the section containing voices is relatively small and secondary (I think) to the orchestral sections... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: A fine mixture of gothic, medieval and modern music and words. You will know some of the themes - it will repay study. This is a superb rendition.
Disadvantages: None

...sympathiser. This is a stigma which still attaches to him. Given the date and place of his writings this is not surprising. However Orff, (unlike Herbert von Karajan or Elisabeth Schwarzkopf) never belonged to the Nazi Party. He was one of only twelve composers to receive a full military exemption from Goebbels's propaganda ministry. It is possible that his cantatas can be considered the only remaining music of the Third Reich. His cantata “Carmina Burana” took many years of experimentation before it received its premiere in Frankfurt in 1937. He took the poems – often in their original language - and converted them into a choral work, a piece of theatrical spectacular. He used a remarkable admixture of classical, romantic, church and plainsong and rumbustuous peasant musical themes. His own description “Cantiones profanae cantoribus et choris... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Very good price, brilliant quality of performance and recording
Disadvantages: None to note

...There are moments in 'The Art of Fugue' that are much more valuable than just its incredible virtuosity. There are moments that surpass everything else that Bach wrote. I can't think of anything that moves me more deeply than the last fugue, the unfinished fugue. Not just because of all the emotional, sentimental views that we inevitably bring to it, not because we know that he died while half way through a bar. But because that last fugue has a sense of peace, that even for Bach, seems completely overwhelming. It's a still a serious world, deserted and rigid and without colour and without light and without motion. This piece reaches hundreds of years into the future. It creates an impression of an infinitely expanding universe. He literally signs his own name - by using the notes Bb A C B (H) for the theme - to the work he... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average somewhat helpful