Andrew Mcgregor delves into a mighty new set marking Bach’s 333rd birthday
Bach 333 - The New Complete Edition
Complete Works
Decca/dg 479 8000
222 CDS plus one DVD and two books They’re calling it the largest, most complete, most authoritative and enriched composer set of all time, and let’s get something clear from the outset; unless you have a serious allergy to Bach you will want this set. Whether or not you need it is the issue, so let’s take a couple of tours through the box and see whether that can help you decide.
Lift off the lid and you’re presented with a kind of Venetian Rialto Bridge of a layout, the books in the middle and 222 CDS cascading downwards on either side, in four sections, the first of which is dedicated to Bach’s Sacred Cantatas. That in itself gives pause for thought: 25 years ago we’d never have had anything like the riches available to us today, and immediately you begin to realise the ambition of the planning. The curators have gone for mainstream, modern, period instrument Bach as the backbone – a complete edition in modern performances, but they’ve not limited themselves to what’s available in the Universal back catalogue, licensing widely to get the things they want. Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s Cantata Pilgrimage is the heart of the Cantatas, many recorded for his Soli Deo Gloria label... a delicious irony, as he only formed the label when DG pulled the plug on the project. But they’ve also bought in some of the best from Masaaki Suzuki’s Cantata cycle for BIS, as well as Ton Koopman, Joshua Rifkin, Philippe Herreweghe, Sigiswald Kuijken and others – and that’s just the main course.
Listen and learn
Every section of Bach 333 also has a brown ‘historic’ supplement exploring performance traditions and recorded history – documents such as Mengelberg conducting parts of the St Matthew Passion in 1930s Amsterdam, cantatas conducted by Fritz Lehman, Werner, Münchinger, Richter, Marriner and Benjamin Britten. You end up exploring the highways and byways of the brown bits of the box, sitting on the floor surrounded by CDS, ears full of performances going back over 70 years that you may never have heard before.
There’s a huge amount to read while you’re listening: the complete texts and translations, full documentation of the recordings, and the two hardback books in the middle – Dorothea Schröder’s lavishly illustrated biography, essays from the Leipzig Bach Archive, Christoph Wolff on what we’re missing from Bach’s output, and Nicholas Kenyon’s Faber Bach guide, newly updated, plus a new edition of the BWV catalogue of works ahead of its official publication.
So, let’s try another trip through the set with the solo violin and cello suites and see what happens. The core sets are two new recordings, from violinist Giuliano Carmignola (simultaneously released separately so his fans won’t have to get the big box if they don’t want to), and – brilliantly – cellist David Watkin, licensed from Resonus. But then you start wondering what’s in the brown ‘Instrumental Traditions’ section, and you find violinists Milstein and Grumiaux, Kremer, Mullova, Batiashvili, Jansen; cellist Pierre Fournier’s complete set alongside Casals, Starker and Maurice Gendron.
While we’re there let’s check out the keyboard works... Helmut Walcha’s pioneering Bach recordings dating back to the first Archiv recording in 1947 on historic instruments, alongside Marcel Dupré, Jean Guillou, Karl Richter and Marie-claire Alain; they’re so intriguing you may end up spending more time in the archive than the mainstream recordings.
Omissions and additions
It’s almost graceless – if not pointless – thinking about what you’d have picked if you were compiling the set, and I’m sure more than a few critics will point out that Glenn Gould is a major omission...but then you’ve already got all the Gould you need, haven’t you? Probably. That’s an issue, actually, because Bach enthusiasts have a problem: they’ll already have a lot of these recordings, but they’ll still want this box because it’s just so desirable.
I’m not going to list more of the essential catalogue; you can explore it for yourself on the helpful website bach333.com. Suffice to say everything is here, in 280 hours of music from 750 performers and 32 record labels, including ten hours of completely new recordings and seven world premieres. But I will just touch on another unexpected delight: the two supplements... Bach Interactive explores early influences on the composer – with music from Buxtehude, Telemann and Vivaldi, through to the wider Bach family – while Bach After Bach looks at the influence of Bach on his own sons and far beyond. From Mozart and Mahler to transcriptions by Reger and Stokowski to Maxwell Davies, Arvo Pärt, Judith Weir and Bartók, it also takes in Bach à la Jazz, with appearances by Claude Bolling, Jacques Loussier, George Shearing and Oscar Peterson.
All you have to do now is decide whether or not you can afford it, or who’s going to buy it for you for Christmas. Then where to put it; it should really come with four screwin legs and a glass top, plus a pair of espresso cups so you can listen to BWV 211. Go on, look it up... maybe your own Bach journey starts here.