POO: Johann Sebastian Bach

Marie-Claire Alain! Pretty much the best organist of the 20th century IMO, her Bach recordings are awesome.

gustav leonhardt

This is dope

http://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.2330767.1440681924!/image/image.jpg

ta for this tip btw, my dad will enjoy it

Blown away this week by the recording of the solo violin sonatas and partitas by Christian Ferras. The first recording of the S&Ps i have really strongly connected with.

Wonderful time with the B Minor Mass yesterday

Keep coming back to this, so good:
https://youtu.be/jruePLnEvMs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jruePLnEvMs&feature=youtu.be

BACH!

I'm gonna go with György Ligeti's answer: Die Kunst der Fuge as played by Evgeni Koroliov.

Ah, Bach!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vxhQqDoAeM

I've been loving this apparently out of print record, especially the fucking insane version of the Fantasy in C minor at 19:00

Also, an obvious one but this is slaying me lately.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn6hKinnZKM

Another good discover recently, this very clear and not overcrowded recording of the Mass in B Minor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idsdL12wBro&list=PLQbgyQZ2H8xCAhDrcH0X3KzeKJoDoA-zu

Digging the Anthony Newman a lot so far, just got through the Cm Fantasy.

I didn't really know about the pedal harpsichord before but it's a great sound, and I love his intense, insane attack and off-kilter phrasing.

I didn't know about him before but he sounds like a piece of work. He wrote an opera about OJ and Nicole.

Forgot to listen to the festival for yet another year

it was glorious as always, probably should have mentioned it as the real impetus for the bump

even ordered myself a dorky bachfest tee

Hilary Hahn Plays Bach - the sequel! Was one of 2018's album highlights for me. His solo violin stuff is miiiindblowing when done well.

she is great

I should listen to her more. I think the only things on my player at the moment are her Mozart violin sonatas disc with natalie zhu and the james newton howard soundtrack for The Village where iirc she was the featured soloist.

I remember liking her Sibelius quite a bit and I have heard way way too many renditions of that piece

for a fairly different rendition of the Bach violin stuff, I like Christian Tetzlaff

Normally I hate wet, romantic interpretations of Bach, but this transcription and performance is fucking incredible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGXBudB_reM

Been enjoying listening to it back to back with the "original" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFcS-vND1Ok

I love Herreweghe's gentle way with the Passions and the Cantatas. Speaking of which, his latest recording of the St. John Passion will be released tomorrow.

the Bach reworks album by Olafsson last year (the one with some added electronic experimentation) was bloody awesome as well I thought.

xp

I see you mentioned it on the classical thread, can understand the scepticism but some of this album is so good - it's got a Ryuichi Sakamoto collab on there as well even though I'm not even sure which one it is - but it's deffo worth checking out imo.

Will do, thanks.

it's got a cool noize versh of a prelude

still waiting for an omni trio remix or sth like that tho

Pt. 2 is indeed quite good, especially the Sakamato & Guðnadóttir reworks. No noized-up prelude here – I assume you're referring to Ben Frost's 'Ladder Mix' of BWV 855a, which is on pt. 1. I'll listen to it next.

lol @ omni trio remix! I was in a very raw emotionally heightened state when I listened to this and loved it at the time. I still think there are about 4 or 5 outstanding tracks on here that justify the project.

xp yes, i immediately chunked both parts into one big 'album'

Bachfest reminder:

https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/#

Why is the "prelude" always actually the best part?

Man, the harmonic movement in this one, no matter how much Bach I hear I keep finding things that surprise me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYfpq_q_egQ

you could probably have convinced me that was an early 20C piece if I didn't know

I don't think I can OPO Bach recording, but if we're just talking keyboard music I'd have to go for Ralph Kirkpatrick's 1967 recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier Book II on clavichord. There's a mystical, shimmering quality to the clavichord on it, and Kirkpatrick's performances are deeply thoughtful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZNnpNzmQZE

The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080. I really like the Emerson Quartet's recording.

The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988. The Gould recordings from 1955 and 1981 are a study in contrasts.

What’s the worst Bach, I wonder? speaking compositionally

There are moments in Musical Offering that are so fragmented that I’m totally fine without them, but that might be cheating

Well-Tempered: the C-major fugue always bugged me, esp after the perfect Prelude, it felt like JS was trying to pack as many statements of the subject in as humanly possible and it becomes leaden and uninteresting

Violin/cello: not a lot of shit in these volumes, it’s pretty spectacular throughout, but the C-major violin fugue is really long and wears out its welcome, and most of the E-flat cello suite is irritating both to play and to listen to; the 2nd Bourrée is cute as a button tho

Never liked the B-A-C-H fugue, personally, but it is so interestingly dissonant for the time that it’s impossible to call it a dud

Oh and my POO Bach is absolutely the second movement of the Double Violin Concerto. I grew up on Zukerman/Midori but enjoy most the NBS performance on YouTube maybe

Bach I don't much like? Concerto in the Italian Style. I can't exactly point to anything wrong with it, it's just so damned F Major. It sounds a little too self-satisfied for me, like a lot of Mozart.

Vivaldi Autumn drives me crazy for the same reason tbh (not the lovely middle movement, the aggressively F-major first and thirds)

Yes, exactly that.

I know very little about the actual history behind various Bach pieces but I always wondered if he just didn't like "the Italian style" very much and was sneering at it a bit when he wrote it.