Customer Reviews

J.S Bach: Brandenburg Concertos 1-6; Orchestral Suites 1-4

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This is probably one of the greatest and unique versions of the Brandeburgs. A collectors item. Whenever played, first time listeners are struck by the difference and elegance of the interpretation. My old 33rpm finally gave way to age and use; finding this digital version relieved my feeling of grief.

It;s hard to believe that, with all thier string vibrato and weepy tremelo, tempo rubato, crescendi and use of a piano for the continuo, that these perfromances where considered very modern when they where first released back in the late 1930s. But that only shows how dramatically Baroque perfromance practice has changed over the last 70 years.
Except for the Third and Fourth Brandenburgs, the tempos are slower, and in some movements much slower, than we've become accustomed to. And even in Brandenburg number Four the adagio is slower than in any any other version I've heard, with a strong emphasis on the melody in the strings which really brings out the pathos of this movement. Though very slow, I also found the performance of the Sixth Brandenburg to be very moving and beautiful.
The srting playing has a real bite to it, and may sound a little abrasive to those accustomed to the smooth, buttery string tone of today's orchestras. But there is a real spontaneity and vitality to these old performances. The playing of the solo parts sounds almost like they were inprovised on the spot, like a jam session, and you can tell the musicians where genuinely enjoying themselves. What I love about old recordings like these is that they are wonderful pieces of history, a window back into the Romantic 19th Century and an age when what we now call Classical Music was still a living art form, and before Bach and the other great 18th and early 19th Century composers became museum pieces. Personally, I've long found "period" performances of Bach to be dry, pedantic and mechanical sounding, full of pinched meodies and phrasing and rigid, metronomic tempos.
And I think the Romantics in some ways had a better intuitive feel for Baroque art and music than we moderns do, not to mention that they were closer in time to it Baroque and Romanitc art were both full of granduer, passion and drama, just the qualities period instrument performances lack. To me they simply trivialize this great music.
So if you're a period instrument enthusiast, than these recordings probably aren't for you, but if you want to hear some genuinely historical "authentic" performances of the Brandenburg Concertos and Suites for orchetra, an authenticity no amount of scolarship can recreate, than you'll love these great old-school performances.

When I was a child I often used to play the socalled "hard discs" which were collected by my father. Among them I found a His Master's Voice disc on which the 1st mvement of Bach's Orchestral Suite No.2. in b-minor was recorded. I didn't like it more than the other discs of the collection. But in 1943 when I was 16 years old we went to have our summer rest in the mountains and I coluldn't listen there to any music. Suddenly I heard this melody in my ears. And when we returned home my first task was to put on this disc and listen to it more times. J. S. Bach became this way my favourite composer. The performance by Mr. Adolf Busch became a model and listening to other performances of this work I found them all less valuable than the Busch performance. During a lot of the passed years I was busy to buy a complete disc of this work but it wan't a success until now. Although it was taken in mono of course /in 1936/ it is a pleasure for me to listen.