Sunday, April 29, 2012

Bach: Brandenburg Concertos


“The playing is ravishing in the chamber-music slow-movement textures. …a recording you must hear, if only to hear how the boundaries of these extraordinary concertos can be stretched.” --BBC Music Magazine, March 2009 ****

“…it is noticeable that these performances have moved away from the clipped articulate gestures of recent decades to embrace something of the older tradition of shapely long lines and smooth phrases. It gives the music an easy feel, relaxed and friendly as befits its chamber status...” --Gramophone Magazine, June 2009


“Though there are already CD versions of the Brandenburg Concertos to suit every taste, Richard Egarr's recordings still manage to carve out a distinctive niche of their own. Anyone with perfect pitch will soon notice that the concertos are delivered at a pitch significantly lower even than the baroque pitch often used for period-instrument performances: the Academy of Ancient Music tunes to A=392 Hz, effectively a whole tone lower than modern concert pitch, which enables them to use the French-model wind instruments that were widely played in Germany in Bach's time, and with just one instrument to a part throughout the orchestra, the textures have a warm, chamber-style intensity. 

The stratospherically high trumpet part in the second concerto loses all its glare (though the recorder in the same concerto gets swamped), while the solo violin in the fourth and fifth concertos can weave its delicate tracery with perfect naturalness. Though Egarr adds a guitar and theorbo to the continuo, the harmony still lacks definition, while the sheer loving detail of the performances sometimes blunts their edge.” --The Guardian, 6th March 2009 ***

2 CD · MP3 320 · 213 MB




No comments:

Post a Comment