In an age when even big-name soloists are trying their hands at historical-performance techniques, it's worthwhile to splash water on one's face from time to time and revisit the era when Bach's music served many performers simply as a stimulus to further creative activity. The piano transcriptions of Bach's music on this two-disc set are by Walter Rummel, a British-American pianist and composer of the interwar era whose mother was the daughter of Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph.

I was interested to see that the Toccata from Pour le Piano comes not from the December 1985 session but from one made in May the following year. I assume either he didn’t record it in December or (more likely?) he was dissatisfied with the results. Inevitably Perlemuter slowed as he aged. There is a BBC broadcast of Pour le piano from 1968 (issued in the BBC Music Magazine) in which things are very much more vital and zestful, in which articulation is crisper and the results very different from the invariably more laboured playing here.

As many readers know, although Bach composed a number of violin concertos (and for other melody instruments), mostly during his years in Coethen (approximately 1717-1723), with respect to violin concertos, only the three represented here remain in their original form (Violin Concerto in A minor, BMV 1041; Violin Concerto in E major, BMV 1042; and the Double Violin Concerto in D Minor, BMV 1043). (The concerto for flute, violin and harpsichord in A minor, BMV 1044, not included here, also remains in its original form).

A superb recording of the Bach's Orchestral Suites transcribed for a piano duet. It makes a great change to hear these excellent pieces of Bach played as a piano duet to the standard orchestral version. I am absolutely delighted with it and it is great that I now have both the original orchestral version (complete) and this complete version too. For anyone who enjoys piano transcriptions of orchestral works, this recording is highly recommended.

Max Reger just couldn't stop composing. With 131 published works, most of them compendiums of several pieces in the same genre, Reger was relentlessly, even recklessly prodigious as a composer. And apparently when he wasn't writing his own music, the fin de siècle Bavarian composer was arranging Bach's. In addition to arrangements of the Brandenburg Concertos and Orchestral Suites for four-hand piano, Reger also transcribed 22 works for solo piano, four organ pieces, and 18 choral preludes, and all of them are included in this two-disc Hyperion set.

Philippe Herreweghe has always seemed well-attuned to the more mystical aspects of Bach’s music, an empathy clearly evident on his new CD of Advent cantatas. Though the opening chorus of BWV 36 seems a touch reserved, those of BWV 61 and 62 match precision with vigour, and Herreweghe’s team of soloists are in fine voice throughout. BWV 36 is a parody, based on an earlier tribute to a local teacher. Bach retained his original music for the arias, but replaced the recitatives with chorales, so the cantata alternates delightfully between dance movements and more formal hymn settings.

Award-winning accordionist Vincent van Amsterdam performs J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, one of the great masterpieces of Western music. The music of J.S. Bach has been heard in countless guises, from those intended to be meticulous in their authenticity, to loose, improvisatory interpretations. Bach’s treatment of his own music was practical and versatile, often tailored to the musicians available rather than an ideal ensemble, so it seems likely that the composer himself would treat this spectrum of approaches with generosity and pleasure.

In the realm of music criticism and scholarship, Bach’s music is often hailed as the epitome of functional musical logic. Every note has its place, every chord has its function, and all musical elements are combined in a masterful display of contrapuntal craft with few recognised rivals. But despite the intellectual reverence to which Bach’s music is subjected, musicians are still able to find themselves intimately and affectively involved with his compositions.

If you know and love the Brandenburgs, seriously consider listening to these renditions for piano duo. In the imagination place yourself in the days before recording; hearing these peices in that way will give an idea of what it must have been like to know Bach, to want to hear Bach, to have the muscial skills to play Bach, but have no chamber orchestra at your disposal. A piano or two would do, if you had Reger's transcriptions. Why wait years for the next concert, if you could play them today? And because Reger loved Bach each piece has an air of homage.

Hyperion’s Bach Transcriptions series shows Bach through the fascinating prism of the Romantic musical mind. This latest volume presents the complete transcriptions by Saint-Saëns, and the programme is interspersed with transcriptions by the elder composer’s friend and disciple, Isidore Philipp. Saint-Saëns was one of the many composers inspired by the continuing publications from the Bach-Gesellschaft, which made many of Bach’s works available in print for the first time, particularly the extraordinary church cantatas.

It is possible to have a lot of fun with this CD. Let me explain. I was sipping a glass of Pinot Grigiot with a very good friend; she has listened to Sebastian since she was six. There can be few nooks and crannies of his repertoire that she has not explored Ц including the cantatas. I slipped this CD into the player and said laconically 'What do you think of this new recording of BachТs СUns ist ein Kind geboren?' By the time we got to the second chorus, she was enthusiastic; at the beautiful alto aria, she was ecstatic.

Murray Perahia is one of the few genuine stars of the piano. His recordings of Bach have been widely, although not universally acclaimed, and even the doubters have to concede that sheer force of personality has helped him command the attention of audiences. The six Bach partitas seem to go together as a set, but Perahia differentiates them to a point where you feel you have all you can handle with just a single disc; the present release is the second in a set of two. None of this is to say that his Bach is of the flashy type.

On Masterworks, the astonishingly virtuosic acoustic powerhouse outfit California Guitar Trio—comprising master steel-string fingerstylists Bert Lams, Hideyo Moriya, and Paul Richards—converges to deliver a breathtakingly precise, highly complex, and masterfully symphonic studio document. Released in 2012 by the specialized progressive imprint Inner Knot, this brilliant interpretive milestone finds the trio applying their legendary King Crimson-hated, Robert Fripp-schooled Crafty Guitar skills to the canon of European classical music. Spanning nearly 55 minutes of immaculate high-fidelity spatial design, the 11-track landscape operates with an electric, lightning-fast, and deeply disciplined kinetic energy. The trio navigates dense orchestral notation and shifting dynamics with telepathic precision, firing off stunning, jaw-dropping arrangements like Bach's sprawling Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Beethoven's blistering Presto Agitato from the Moonlight Sonata, and a hauntingly stark, beautifully layered adaptation of Arvo Pärt's modern masterpiece Fratres. Driven by their interlocked multi-directional picking lines and unparalleled dynamic control, this pristine archive remains an indispensable masterclass for serious progressive rock purists, acoustic guitar enthusiasts, and classical crossover collectors worldwide.

Hogwood’s accounts are stylish and well recorded, though not quite so bracing in their effect. Both he and Gardiner have the same soloist in the B minor Suite, Lisa Beznosiuk, today’s leading exponent of the Baroque flute. Hers is an appealingly light and delicate tone, one that gives her an almost ghostlike presence in the tuttis. But she is able to hold her own in the solo passages, despite the difficulty of fingering, and in both accounts her playing is nicely ornamented, not overly affected.

Dutch cellist Mayke Rademakers performing the suites for cello solo by Bach, alternated with cello works by Gubaidulina, Britten, Kurtág, Penderecki and Schnittke. According to performer Mayke Rademakers, an authentic listening experience is, despite what we would all like to believe, simply not possible. For that reason she has strived to make a connection with today's world, by pairing the suites with works by contemporary composers, setting them in an unusual and sharp perspective.