![]() ![]() The core of the whole enterprise was always the pioneering set of the complete sacred cantatas: 60 CDs in the original set, on which Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt worked tirelessly with their ensembles for Das Alte Werk over more than 20 years. On a musical level, certainly, there can be very few complaints. As a concept alone, it's pretty astonishing to be able to hold the whole life's work of one of the greatest composers in the history of western music in the palm of one's hand – but it would be only that, and the empty triumph of technology over artistic quality, if the results were not worthwhile both musically and technically. Now the whole set has been made available at a remarkably low price as more than 3,000 MP3 files on a single memory stick, together with PDFs of essays from the original recordings, though not, as far as I could establish, the texts of the vocal works, even though there would have been plenty of space for them on the memory stick. ![]() It was an extraordinarily comprehensive achievement, which ran to 154 discs, including a DVD of a BBC documentary from its great composers series. All the works were performed on period instruments and ranged from the earliest of the cantata recordings, dating from 1963, to those of some of the instrumental trios made in the late 1990s to plug the few gaps in the survey. I n 2000, Teldec issued its complete Bach edition on CD, made up of four decades of releases from its catalogue, as well as the Das Alte Werk labels. ![]()
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January 2023
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