REWIND
Great artists talk about their past recordings
MY FINEST MOMENT JS Bach
Cantatas, Vol. 1
Yumiko Kurisu, Koki Katano,
Peter Kooij, Akira Tachikawa; Bach Collegium Japan/masaaki Suzuki
BIS BIS-751 (1995)
This was my first experience of making a CD with my group and with the company BIS. It’s a short recording of 48 minutes, with Cantatas BWV 4, 150 and 196. It was not at all easy technically, and it was hard for us all to get through the first session. The producer was Robert von Bahr, the director of BIS, and he was really enthusiastic about making this CD with us. He didn’t have so much recording experience with period instruments, while we had a lot of experience playing on period instruments but not so much experience with how to make CDS. So we had many arguments and troubles. This is the most impressive CD but not the fondest one! We didn’t know in 1995 whether it was even possible to go on with the Bach cantata project.
But we were all so excited during the sessions, and Robert came to me, grabbed my shoulders and
was shouting, ‘We must go on!’. That was a wonderful memory. Maybe the performance was not 100 per cent rounded if you compare it with the very last volume (Volume 55, 18 years later) though it is fresh. Still, it was the most impressive experience for me.
MY FONDEST MEMORY JS Bach
Cantatas, Vol. 2
Midori Suzuki, Aki Yanagisawa, Yoshikazu Mera, Gerd Türk, Peter Kooij; Bach Collegium Japan/masaaki Suzuki
BIS BIS-781 (1996)
We recorded this disc in the Kobe Shoin Women’s University Chapel, which is quite a big church with 300 seats and a very high ceiling, with wonderful acoustics. It’s a beautiful modern building. The recording includes Bach’s Actus Tragicus, BWV 106, the cantata for a funeral. There’s a very peaceful and calm sinfonia at the start, which we recorded in the middle of the night, around two or three o’clock in the morning. It was so calm, so quiet. It was the end of our sessions, we had done all the vocal parts, the singers had le! already, and we were only five or six musicians le! in the chapel. When we finished, everyone was so satisfied. No one could stand up actually, as really our bodies were completely filled with this quiet and peaceful sound. It was like we were dreaming. It was a magical moment.
I’D LIKE ANOTHER GO AT… JS Bach
St Matthew Passion
Nancy Argenta, Robin Blaze,
Peter Kooij, Makoto Sakurada,
Gerd Türk, Chiyuki Urano; Bach Collegium Japan/masaaki Suzuki
BIS BIS-1000 (1999)
Probably we should rerecord everything in the cantatas project once again from the very beginning, but it took 20 years and who knows how long we have le! to live. It’s already ten years since we recorded the B minor Mass, one of my favourite works by Bach, so we could do it once again. Recording it was another of my fondest memories. We had wonderful soloists, including soprano Carolyn Sampson and countertenor Robin Blaze. But really we should do the St Matthew Passion again first. I was very happy with the result, but our performance style has slightly changed. It was a good recording but I think we can do even better. All the time di"erent ideas come about. Our approach to the music has never changed, but probably now we are slightly more flexible than before. In the first half of our long
Bach project we always tried to do the best, but sometimes we had struggles to find out how to interpret this and that di#cult phrasing, questions about instrumentation, tempos and rhythm and so on. Now I think I feel slightly more flexible and less theoretical. Mainly because we are getting much older so we can see the music with a freer feeling, which is good I think. Masaaki Suzuki’s new recording of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is out on
BIS on 30 March