All the big labels were invited to join. Sometimes the answer came immediately, sometimes it took months of waiting in vain (and with time flying away!) to hear their negative reaction, always nicely put, but nevertheless making sure that there were many sleepless nights. Finally, with the support of Ron van Eeden and Challenge Classics, I decided to start my own label, Antoine Marchand. Following the example of my friend Jordi Savall, I concluded that if no one else will dare to take the risk, I will do so myself. So I went to the bank, asked for a loan and my own label was born.
At this moment, in March 2005, we have released 19 of the 22 boxes of cantatas. Everything, including the old Erato recordings, has been issued in new and improved packaging with very Dutch, Calvinistic church interior paintings by Saenredam on the cover. We completed the recordings in October 2003 and in February 2004 we organised a final festive concert in Bach’s Thomaskirche in Leipzig in which soloists, conductor, orchestra and choir contributed without exception without fee in gratitude to Bach and his brilliant music. Afterwards we held a great celebration dinner for everybody who had contributed to the Bach Cantata concerts and recordings in Leipzig’s oldest restaurant1.
The Recordings
Recording all Bach cantatas might seem unproblematic from a musicological point of view. The Neue Bachausgabe together with the Kritischer Berichte provided us with Urtexts. It was no problem to find the specialists in my Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra playing on period instruments and lots of singers applied to sing this beautiful music. Earlier, with the help of Simon Schouten, I raised a new choir, the Amsterdam Baroque Choir, as a pendant of the already existing Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra.
What changes do we see since the Harnoncourt/Leonhardt recordings? Boy sopranos and altos have become very scarce. I do not mean the common, often beautiful sounding boys’ choirs with very young boys, but boys of the age of fourteen to sixteen or older who are able to master the very difficult material.
In Bach’s time a boy’s voice broke around the age of sixteen or seventeen. We know of boys at that time singing soprano or alto parts up to the age of eighteen or even nineteen.
Boys entered the Thomasschule when they were twelve years old. They were assigned to one of the four choirs that Bach supervised. The solo parts were sung by the best pupils of the school, who were mostly the older boys, as they had to mature and develop their skills to be able to perform properly Bach’s very demanding scores. It is nice for parents to hear the angelic voices of their young sons, but Bach’s music needs more than that!
Bach did have another problem: his tenors and basses were often too young, while his sopranos and altos were adolescents! Leonhardt and Harnoncourt recorded in a kind of intermediate phase. At that time you still could find boys of the quality of Sebastian Hennig who contributed to their recordings up to the age of fifteen. You can hear him grow while listening to the recordings. When he is thirteen years old, his voice starts to ripen, becoming increasingly mature in musicality. This was certainly the norm in Bach’s time. Now this is not possible anymore. Even boys’ choirs nowadays use female soloists for their soprano and alto parts. It is a great loss that we have to do without the extremely musical boy soloist who sung without fear, sure of himself and with good intonation and technique.
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