Win Sir John Eliot Gardiner's complete Bach cantatas box-set!
Gramophone
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
Enter our competition to win this luxuriously presented and beautifully recorded collection
It's Christmas competition time! We have a box-set of the complete Bach cantatas performed by the Monteverdi Choir and Sir John Eliot Gardiner to give away. Not only that, but a runner-up will receive a Christmas cantatas box-set, and everyone who enters the prize draw will receive an exclusive discount on music from SDG.
When the complete cantatas box-set was released earlier this year, James Jolly wrote in Gramophone: 'One of the most staggering achievements – in terms of ambition, execution, presentation and cultural significance – emerged from the millennial project by the Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists and Sir John Eliot Gardiner to perform all of Bach’s sacred cantatas during the course of a single year. The performances, which were recorded during the tour, started to emerge on disc in 2005. Now all 56 CDs have been gathered together in an elegant black box. As well as a slim booklet of essays and a complete listing by both CD contents and BWV number, there’s a CDR that contains Gardiner’s excellent notes as well as the texts and translations of all the cantatas. Steve McCurry’s extraordinarily vivid photographs still adorn each sleeve to great effect. But it is the impact of this music that makes it such an achievement: Bach squares up to the highs and lows of mankind, and our baser motives and higher aspirations are engaged with in a musical language that transcends the passing of time. If ever part of a major composer’s work needed rediscovering it’s the Bach cantatas – we really know too few of them.’