For his first recording on the Alpha label, Sergey Kasprov, a young Russian artist trained at the Moscow Conservatory, defies the laws of time. He has in fact chosen to create a dialogue between great Baroque geniuses and Russian Romantics: Rameau, Lully, Loeillet, Bach and Scarlatti revised by Tausig, Godowsky and Rachmaninov.In the tradition of Marcelle Meyer, Glenn Gould or, more recently, Alexandre Tharaud, Sergey Kasprov pulls off the tour de force of freeing himself from Baroque interpretative codes and, at the same time, from those of the 19th century, to better get back to the essential.The excellent recording quality attests ideally to the discourse, respectful of the original counterpoint as well as unfailing digital dexterity necessitated by appropriate ornamentation and the amazing sound palette required by late Romanticism, all on a Steinway contemporary with Rachmaninov.

Hamburg-based Estonian oboist Kalev Kuljus earned his music degrees from the Estonian Academy of Music, the Lyon National Conservatory, and the Music University Karlsruhe. He has performed alongside many renowned orchestras, including the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. Kuljus’s repertoire covers music from Baroque to Contemporary, and many Estonian composers have dedicated works to him. This album, Kuljus’s debut, includes some of the most loved oboe concertos from the Baroque era from Vivaldi, Telemann, Bach, and Marcello. Working alongside the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, Kuljus sounds at his very best in these recordings.

Over the years, the Bach Suites have become a monument of the cello repertoire, to which all cellists return regularly. Some of the greatest did not record these works until they reached their years of maturity (Casals was over 60, Rostropovich was 63), while others have not hesitated to present several versions (Yo-Yo Ma, 1990, 1998; Janos Starker, 1957, 1963, 1983). Ophélie Gaillard’s first recording of the Suites, released on Ambrosie in 2000, was highly acclaimed internationally by the critics and her performance earned her a French Classical Music Award (Victoire) as a "Revelation" in the Solo Instrumentalist category. Ten years later, at the request of Nicolas Bartholomée, artistic director of Aparte and indeed Ambroisie, she agreed to record a new version on a cello made in 1737 by Matteo Goffriller, a contemporary of J. S. Bach. Ophélie Gaillard had already given us a reference performance of these pieces. Now we discover a prodigiously renewed vision of this masterpiece.

In the '80s there were those listeners who thought that Heinrich Schiff might redeem cello performance practice from fatal beauty and lethal elegance. Aside from the burly and brawny Rostropovich, more and more cellists were advocating a performance style whose ideals were perfect intonation and graceful phrasing. In some repertoire, say, Fauré, these are perfectly legitimate goals. In other repertoire, Beethoven and Brahms, say, it is a terrible mistake. In Bach's Cello Suites, as the fay and fragile Yo-Yo Ma recordings make clear, it was a terminal mistake. Not so in Schiff's magnificently muscular 1984 recordings of the suites: Schiff's rhythms, his tempos, his tone, his intonation, and especially his interpretations were anything but fay or fragile. In Schiff's performance, Bach's Cello Suites are not the neurasthenic music of a composer supine with dread and despair in the dark midnight of the soul, but the forceful music of a mature composer in full control of himself and his music.

Steven Isserlis and Richard Egarr here assemble all the viola da gamba sonatas written by three composers born in the propitious year of 1685: one each by Handel and Domenico Scarlatti, and three by JS Bach. Isserlis plays them on the gamba’s modern cousin, the cello, and the microphone loves his playing, picking up all the nuances and scampering asides from his soft-spoken instrument which can sometimes get lost in big concert halls. Egarr on harpsichord matches Isserlis’s eloquence and rambunctious energy all the way. The dreamy, airy slow movement of Bach’s Sonata in G minor brings telling use of vibrato as Isserlis circles around Egarr, his playing at once idiomatic and soulful. An extra cellist reinforces the bass line in the Handel and Scarlatti, in which the composers give the harpsichordist only a framework; Egarr’s imaginative realisations ensure that even when Scarlatti is at his most repetitive, he is never dull.

Youthful Viennese pianist Till Fellner has performed J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier to critical acclaim across Europe, and has made it the backbone of his recital repertoire. For this recording of Book I, Fellner performs the 24 preludes and fugues with a rich and full sound, yet with the refinement and fastidious control required in these comprehensive studies of Baroque keyboard technique. Articulation and balanced phrasing are of paramount importance, and Fellner's energies are directed to the clean execution of lines and the careful shading of contrapuntal voicings. What emotion he communicates is subtle and somewhat constrained to the contrasting characters of each pairing – the preludes and fugues often play off each other – yet his interpretations are quite colorful and varied over the course of the set. Neither cerebral nor effusive, Fellner renders the music in an appealing middle area between schools of interpretation, and achieves imaginative results that should please both traditionalists and fans of period practice.

The music of Bach's 'St. John Passion', which the composer wrote for Holy Week in 1724 immediately after his appointment as cantor of St Thomas's Church in Leipzig, still retains all its freshness and vitality nearly 300 years later, and is a true Baroque delight. The two main choruses Herr, unser Herrscher and Ruht wohl, ihr heiligen Gebeine form the beginning and culmination of a large-scale orchestral and vocal structure in which Bach reveals his absolute mastery of polyphony. Inwardly reflective chorales are as much interwoven into the events of the Passion as the haunting arias which comment on the biblical texts of the Gospel of St John. Throughout this solemn Passion oratorio, there is a constant emphasis on Baroque musical magnificence. What makes this live recording of the concert version of March 7, 2015 in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz so special? The fresh voices of the young and excellent vocal soloists, the regularly praised "astonishing three-dimensionality" and "crystalline clarity" of the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks under the direction of Peter Dijkstra and, of course, the renowned period instrument ensemble Concerto Köln.

The music on this recording demonstrates how composers in Germany, Italy, Austria and England responded to the challenges of writing for violin senza basso. Music for violin senza basso had a distinguished history before Bach and was widely cultivated by his contemporaries. Violinistic virtuosity was extraordinarily experimental in the late seventeenth century, with novelties in the tuning of the strings (scordaura), bowing techniques, chordal playing and contrapuntal textures (with the development of sophisticated double-, triple- and quadruple-stopping techniques) and playing in high positions. This disc of solo violin music is a real mixture of some of Rachel’s favourite pieces. Rachel Podger is one of the most creative talents to emerge in the field of period performance. Over the last two decades she has established herself as a leading interpreter of the music of the Baroque and Classical periods.

Even though Angela Hewitt's repertoire is quite extensive and diverse, encompassing the Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and modern eras, her true specialty is the music of J.S. Bach, which she has recorded almost exclusively for Hyperion since the 1980s. With this recording of The Art of Fugue, Hewitt completes her long-running series of piano renditions of the solo keyboard works, and while not everyone is convinced that Bach composed this study of fugal techniques for the keyboard, Hewitt's performance is credible and satisfying. She controls the often unwieldy counterpoint by regarding the lines as if they were vocal parts, and her phrases are shaped by natural breathing points, as well as the different emotional qualities she brings to each fugue and canon. The Art of Fugue can be daunting for both performer and listener because its persistent tonality of D minor and monothematic material can be quite tedious in the wrong hands.

Brazilian cellist Antonio Meneses, a member of the Beaux Arts Trio and a frequent collaborator of the world’s greatest conductors and orchestras, takes a solo turn with the most noble of works for his instrument, J S Bach’s Six Cello Suites. A consummate master of his instrument, Antonio started playing the cello when he was 10 years old. At the age of 16 his musical studies took him to Europe, and in 1982 he won the Gold Medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. He has performed with the Berlin Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and New York Philharmonic, among others, with such conductors as Karajan, Abbado, Rostropovich, Muti and Chailly. In the recording studio he famously collaborated with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in Brahms’ Double Concerto for Violin and Cello (with Anne-Sophie Mutter), and Strauss’ Don Quixote. Playing a Jean-Baptiste Vuillaumme cello from Paris c.1840, Antonio’s renditions of Bach’s seminal works are marked by purity and grace, introspection and sophistication.

What you will find on this disc is A) contrapunctus I-IX played on two different organs in 1962; B) contrapunctus I II & IV from a1981 TV broadcast; C) contrapunctus IX XI & XIII in mono from a radio broadcast in 1967; D) the unfinished contrapunctus XIV from what may or may not be the same TV broadcast as B); and as a final filler E) a prelude and fugue on the name BACH from a studio recording in 1980. Items B)-E) are given on the piano.

With his 2017 release on Erato, Jean Rondeau illustrates the beginnings of the harpsichord concerto, which can be traced from the Baroque masterpieces of Johann Sebastian Bach through the early Classical period, represented here by works of his sons, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and Johann Christian Bach. While this celebrated musical dynasty contributed to many forms in the 18th century, the keyboard concerto was given a special, innovative treatment by the Bachs, who effectively put the genre on the map.

This cycle of preludes and fugues composed by Johann Sebastian Bach ranks tremendously high in the world of music. It is not just one of the immortal masterpieces of the world music literature; it is an encyclopedia of polyphonic art, a handbook for life, and an inexhaustible source of delight. Sviatoslav Richter said, Whenever I set to the Well-Tempered Clavier, I always get consumed with a desire not to exclude any of the sides for the sake of one narrow and dogmatic position. I am confident that Bach can be played in different ways, with different articulation and different dynamics, as long as the whole is preserved and the performance is convincing.

The recordings released in this series are devoted to the music of Bach, never a specialty among Russians, and they have the feeling of something extreme, developed in isolation. Feinberg plays Bach, perhaps, as Liszt might have heard Bach and played him – with maximum use of the pedals, a full range of dynamics, and an approach that in every way transforms Bach into an arch-Romantic. This disc, in the label's Feinberg series, is perhaps the most extreme of all, for here the artist tackles not only piano works but those for organ – the listener is treated not only to Feinberg's interpretations but also to his transcriptions. Sample the booming bass lines of the group of chorale preludes in the middle of the program. Of course, the line between transcription and interpretation in this case is not terribly clear. Taken as a whole, the Chromatic fantasia and fugue, BWV 903, leaves the impression that the music has been pushed nearly as far as in Busoni's Bach transcriptions; it's not Bach, really, but it's quite a thrill.

The CD combines Bach's Goldberg Variations with the Metamorphosis of Philip Glass and offers a confrontation between two completely different musical worlds.