Bach, (J.L.): Trauermusik

"Harmonia Mundi's presentation is superb. The sound is wonderfully clear and full. The documentation is excellent, including some fine colour illustrations. Johann Ludwig Bach's masterpiece has been splendidly served here and I urge collectors to investigate this very fine issue."
(Recording of the Month MusicWeb May 2011)

"Here's a real find...Don't be put off by the funeral music title; this is optimistic and celebratory and it bursts with trumpets-and-drums fervour in honour of the departed Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, while visions of the heavenly host mingle with deep-felt grief in complex counterpoint...Excellent performances; a major rediscovery which should be heard here."
(The Observer)

"The RIAS Chamber Choir enunciates its words clearly and accentuates the text lightly, thrilling to the stereo banter of the double choruses and bringing a wonderful grace to Johann Ludwig's less obvious ideas...A must-have for lovers of the German Baroque: no wonder Johann Sebastian thought it worth performing so music of Ludwig's music in Leipzig."
(International Record Review)

"unmannered and irradiating solos from Rademann's singers allow the listener to penetrate the courtly virtues of employer and employee in unusually close collaboration - and the whole amounts to rather more than the individual parts...Rademann makes as strong a case for Ludwig's best surviving work as one can imagine."
(Gramophone)

Here is the most ambitious composition left by Johann Ludwig Bach, known as 'the Meiningen Bach', who belonged to a branch of the family separated from Johann Sebastian's since the 16th century. Its genesis was rather unusual: Johann Ludwig composed his cantatas to texts by his patron, Duke Ernst Ludwig, and was therefore commissioned to set the poem which the duke had written for his own funeral, in November 1724. Five years before St Matthew Passion, this score already requires two choirs and a large array of instruments, and must have utilised every musician in the court Kapelle. Since the 2007-08 season Hans-Christoph Rademann has been chief conductor of the RIAS Kammerchor. He grew up in a family of Kantors, and during his training as a choral and orchestral conductor at the Musikhochschule in Dresden he already founded the Dresdner Kammerchor, with which he made a reputation both in Germany and abroad, and which he still directs today.