Search - Bach, Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin :: Brandenburg Concertos Nos 1-6

These days there seem to be two fundamental styles of playing Bach and other 18th-century composers on period instruments: one approach is to try to get the ensemble to sound as polished, balanced, and elegant as possible--which is favored by most British and North American groups--while the other is to emphasize the piquant coloration, raucous loud dynamics, and scrappy individual tone of the old instruments--which seems to be preferred by most of the German and Italian bands out there, as represented by Il Giardino Armonico par excellence. These exuberant, somewhat rough-hewn accounts of the Brandenburg Concertos, from the Berlin-based Akademie für Alte Musik, belong decidedly to the latter category, but are without a doubt among the best of their kind currently available on disc. Recorded in 1997 and first released in 1998, the readings celebrate texture and timbre with playing that is spiky, sharply accented, wiry, and energetic but never unduly abrasive or rude. Bach's voice leading and sparkling contrapuntal refinements sometimes get lost in the shuffle, but there is a sense of panache to the performances that gets back to the very meaning of Baroque--as something "strange, irregular, and fantastic." --Ted Libbey