Bolette Roed J.S. BACH Sonatas - Partitas - Suites

This new Ondine release by Danish-born recorder player Bolette Roed includes the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) arranged for solo recorder. The works were arranged by Frans Brüggen (1934–2014), famous Dutch recorder player and conductor who was of the greatest importance to the movement of the historically informed performance practice.

With the exception of his Partita BWV 1013, Bach wrote relatively few works for the recorder. However, composers like Bach and Vivaldi did themselves arrange many of their works for different instruments. From this point of view the work of arranging Bach’s solo cello and violin pieces for recorder is something what Bach himself could have done, had he been inspired by a talented recorder player himself at the time of his compositions. For this recording several different recorders were being chosen. For the 11 movements written for the violin original keys were kept by changing the recorders accordingly. The cello suites are being played by one recorder only by transposing the original keys down a minor second.

Bolette Roed is an award-winning artist who regularly performs with major Danish orchestras as well as with early music ensembles and baroque orchestras in various countries. Bolette Roed strives to extend the instrument’s repertoire beyond its established role in Early Music, towards new frontiers of improvisation, folk, and world music. Roed further aspires to adapt canonical classical works to the recorder and stays in constant dialogue with and commissions new works from today’s composers.

Cappella Amsterdam / Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century / Frans Brüggen JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH St. John Passion, BWV 245

One of the many delights coming from Frans Brüggen’s distinguished career has been the understanding which he brings to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach – such as here with the St John Passion – whether on the concert platform or on record. Brüggen’s cultured feeling for Bach’s musical structures as much as for its style and expressive content permits a textural clarity enjoyed by few of his directing colleagues. A special wealth of experience in the music of Bach has also been gained by the members of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century across the three decades of its existence and as part of its regular concert series (there have now been over a hundred of these tours!) and with a concentrated opportunity to focus on one work, Bach’s masterpiece was performed and recorded in Spring 2010.
Also of special note on this new recording is the presence of a solo group comprising both distinguished and rising talents, led by Markus Schäfer as the Evangelist and Thomas Oliemans as Jesus, and with Michael Chance and Marcel Beekman singing arias together with the added luxury of the present-day “Bach bass” par excellence in Peter Kooij and the radiant-voiced Carolyn Sampson. Choral support comes from the Cappella Amsterdam, also present (as was Peter Kooij) on another of Frans Brüggen’s recent revisitings for Glossa and The Grand Tour of the glories of Bach’s choral music, the B minor Mass. (Glossa)

Yulianna Avdeeva / Orchestra of the 18th Century / Frans Brüggen CHOPIN Piano Concertos 1 & 2

The National Institute Frederyck Chopin has already released a massive box set of Chopin's complete works performed on instruments of the composer's time, and that included recordings of both of these concertos with Frans Brüggen and the Orchestra of the 18th Century; the Dutch musicians have become regular visitors to the Chopin and His Europe festival in Warsaw each summer. The institute has now released another period-instrument disc of the concertos with the same conductor and orchestra, but the soloist this time is Yulianna Avdeeva, the highly rated winner of the most recent International Chopin Piano Competition, which took place in the Polish capital in 2010.

For the recordings Avdeeva plays a renovated Erard piano built in Paris in 1849, reckoned to be practically identical to instruments that Chopin knew and played. For its sound alone, it's a fascinating document; the Erard, with its lean, incisive lower register and a crisply defined treble that has just a hint of percussive edge, is wonderfully profiled against the vibrato-free string textures of the orchestra so that not a single detail is missed. But these performances are much more than exercises in historical reconstruction, however intriguing the soundworld they create. Avdeeva's recital appearances in Britain have yet to demonstrate why her competition victory created such a stir, but there's no doubt of the quality of the artistic imagination at work here.

Whether it's in the bold, dramatic shapes that she creates in the first movements of both works, the energy with which she propels the two finales, or the spellbinding beauty of her playing in the central Larghettos, their tracery delicately crystalline and their lyricism airy and unfettered, there seems to be a real spontaneity about Avdeeva's approach. It's as if by performing these works on a very different instrument from the usual modern concert grand she's discovering a new range of possibilities, a new palette of keyboard colours. Her performances may not quite rival the all-time classic versions on record, but they do offer fresh and hugely rewarding alternatives. (The Guardian)