Latest Release
- NOV 5, 2024
- 30 Songs
- Focus Music, Classical Songs to Help You Focus · 2020
- Media Classics · 2000
- Chromium x Classics · 2021
- J.S. Bach: Cantatas, BWV 106, 182, 152, 118, 18, 89, 90, 161 & 59 · 1967
- Gould & Bach: Perfect Match · 1960
- Cavendish Classical presents Cavendish Players: Baroque Moods - Dark & Sad · 1993
- Gould & Bach: Perfect Match · 1960
- Gould & Bach: Perfect Match · 1960
- J.S. Bach: Christmas Oratorio (Highlights) · 1987
- J.S. Bach: Favourite Cantatas · 1992
Essential Albums
- “What power does this music possess,” Yo-Yo Ma pondered on his website before the release of this, his third recording of Bach’s cello suites, “that even today, after 300 years, it continues to help us navigate through troubled times?” There’s no doubt that he answered his own question eloquently and powerfully in these performances. For Ma, who still regularly performs this music in concert, Bach’s music contains “infinite variety” in which the composer strives “to understand everything a cello can do,” He tells of how the composer wrote the six cello suites during the only time in his life that he wasn’t working for the church. “I think of those years as his sabbatical years,” he says. “In other words, the years when he would have fun in saying, ‘What can I do with a lab where I can try all these experiments?’” In the suites, adds Ma, Bach experiments not just with the capabilities of the cello itself, but with music’s power to express the inexpressible, to tap even into ideas of nature and humanity. Read on as Yo-Yo guides us through each of the suites and offers an insight into his interpretations. Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major “Suite No. 1 is the very first Suite I learned when I was four years old. For me, it describes always something in nature or water—something of infinite variety. But there’s an interesting thing that happens in the music of the opening movement. It stops in the middle and then rebuilds stronger. That’s part of the storyline that Bach experiments with over and over again, and is not unlike what we do in society.” Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 2 in D Minor “The first movement of this Suite is actually the very first piece I performed as a five-year-old in Paris. Like many of the suites, No. 2 has a head, heart, and hands structure, with the fourth movement Sarabande being the heart, the legs being the Menuets and the Gigue. In the first movement, again, there’s a breakdown. You can hear someone trying, trying, trying to get to somewhere, but being somewhat beaten down, even though the music keeps striving. The suite, however, ends with a note of hope. To this day, it is one of my favorite suites.” Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 3 in C Major “It’s so wonderful when you find a piece of music that is just about pure joy. Joy and celebration. Joy and celebration of human achievement. Joy and celebration of what nature’s bounty gives us. In Suite No. 3, you have the fullness of this expression—which is part of Bach’s wish to understand everything that a cello can do.” Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 4 in E-Flat Major “After three suites, Bach thinks he knows the cello completely, but then he asks himself the question, ‘Can the cello do what I want it to do?’ Starting at Suite No. 4, he expands what the instrument can do, but he starts to fool around with structures and takes you into strange places. It’s an amazing achievement. With this suite, we get taken into amazing territory.” Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 5 in C Minor “We know Bach was frustrated with certain pipe organs, that they weren’t able to do enough—but it was also true with the cello. By the time you get to Suite No. 5, he decides that he wants more richness. But the cello can’t do it, so you know what he does? He tunes down a string, and that allows him to explore emotional content. And he expands the form—instead of the Prélude being purely an improvisation, he puts a fugue in it, the most complex way to organize music of that era. Then each of the following dance movements goes through a wormhole that takes you into different dimensions.” Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 6 in D Major “Bach thinks he knows everything about the cello, but he wants it to do more. So he wrote the Sixth Suite for a cello with an extra string. He found an instrument to fulfill his desire. We play it on the cello, but it takes us into the higher reaches of the instrument, which are very hard to do. The purpose of doing that is not for technique, but it’s to create architecture. This is the suite where he reaches for the heavens, and he gets you to the sublime, he gets you to transcendence, he gets you to cosmic celebration. It is an unbelievable achievement. After he finishes the Sixth, he doesn’t write a seventh because the seventh is there for rest. It’s the Sabbath.”
- A rich, spatial sound is just one sterling attribute of this recording of Bach’s more popular Passion. Werner Güra makes for a splendid Evangelist, while the choral work—split between the Berlin RIAS Chamber Chorus and Berlin State And Cathedral Choir—is heavenly. Though it wouldn’t be a René Jacobs interpretation if there weren’t a couple of idiosyncrasies (including the choice of lute accompaniment during “Komm, Süßes Kreuz”), the conductor ably manages the difficult task of letting certain sections breathe while keeping the whole work moving with undeniable propulsion.
- If you thought Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos demand Teutonic seriousness, think again. Rinaldo Alessandrini, directing his virtuoso Concerto Italiano from the harpsichord, brings a Mediterranean warmth and verve that reveals how much Bach drew from his Italian contemporaries. Solo lines emerge with clarity but also with terrific energy, and the ensemble passages fuse animation and order with winning results. In these six concertos—no two scored the same—Bach threw down the gauntlet and, in doing so, invented a musical language. There are dozens of fine recordings, but Concerto Italiano’s, from 2005, is one of the finest.
- Thanks to a potent mix of rhythmic precision and blinding-fast tempos—just listen to the lift-off of Variation 5—Glenn Gould burst onto the record industry's radar with his 1955 performance of this Bach masterwork. Appropriately, the pianist also closed his studio career with a more ruminative (yet still exciting) version, in 1981. Gould’s distinct intelligence, palpable in both takes, has inspired generations of Bach interpreters. And though you’ll likely have a preference among them (as well as your own opinions about Gould’s murmurings from the piano bench), you simply can’t have one performance and not the other. Inside the Album Booklet The booklet to Glenn Gould’s 1955 and 1981 recordings of the Goldberg Variations contains a detailed and illuminating essay on Bach’s monumental keyboard work, written by Gould himself. There is also a fascinating glimpse into the 1981 studio sessions by one of the recording’s producers, Samuel H. Carter, and portrait photographs of Gould from both periods. Album booklets are available in the latest version of Apple Music Classical, which you can download and enjoy as part of your Apple Music subscription. To access booklets, tap on the book icon at the top of your screen.
- Bach’s music has long fascinated jazz musicians, and Keith Jarrett has gone further than most in exploring the keyboard works. For Book 1, he plays a piano (for Book 2, he chose a harpsichord) and proves a respectful champion of this great score, offering a straightforward approach that is totally convincing. Not overtly pianistic, he presents the music with clarity, an evident feel for its structure, and a sensitive choice of tempos.
Artist Playlists
- The Baroque genius’ music combines deep humanity and an exquisite craftsmanship.
- The music by Bach that we all know is just the tip of an enormous and wondrous iceberg.
- Meet the relatives of Johann Sebastian—each with their fair share of great talent.
- 2024
Appears On
About Johann Sebastian Bach
A titan of the Baroque period, Johann Sebastian Bach created art that reveals profound truths about the human condition. His perfectly crafted music uplifts heart and mind, inviting contemplation of life’s impermanence and the promise of eternal salvation, a point underlined by the dedication Soli Deo Gloria (“Glory to God alone”) inscribed on the manuscripts of so many of his compositions, both sacred and secular. Born in 1685 into a large dynasty of musicians in the German town of Eisenach, Bach learned invaluable lessons as a boy chorister and church organist. His inventive genius and absolute mastery of counterpoint touched almost every genre of the day, including cantatas and organ pieces for sacred services and exhilarating concert works such as the Brandenburg Concertos and Four Orchestral Suites. In 1723, having long served aristocratic employers, Bach became music director at St. Thomas’ Church in Leipzig. Within five years, he completed around 150 church cantatas, Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben among them, a majestic Magnificat, and the St. John and St. Matthew Passions—towering monuments of sacred music. While these alone would have secured his place among the immortals, he went on to create an unrivaled series of sacred and secular masterworks, the Mass in B minor, the Goldberg Variations, and The Art of Fugue among them. He died in Leipzig in 1750, survived by his second wife and nine of his 20 children, and leaving a matchless legacy of music that conveys a radiant vision of heaven on earth.
- BORN
- 1685
- GENRE
- Classical