Brilliant Classics

In the coming weeks, I've got at least a couple of notes I'll be posting that deal with fairly obscure works by very well-known classical composers.  Before I get there, I wanted to make a fairly extended plug for a company that's helped me find a lot of this little-known work.  If you've read my home-page bio or are familiar with me from other online sources, you know that, despite having spent most of my professional life in the field of data management, by training I'm a classical music composer and theorist with degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, the New England Conservatory of Music and Princeton University.  I underscore that background here only by way of saying that I've been immersed in classical music for a VERY long time and have always tried to understand the repertoire of my field as thoroughly as I can.  Even so, there's been a LOT of music written in the last millenium and it's very difficult to have even a moderately comprehensive knowledge of it.  To that end, I'm always grateful for everything from performers to record companies to online services that make it a bit easier to delve into the great (and sometimes not-so-great) works of our past.  One such company that I'd like to call out now is the Dutch record label Brilliant Classics."

Yes, we actually used to listen to music on these things!

Now I've always been something of a "completist," especially with composers about whose work I'm very passionate.  Spanning my high-school days and into my early years in college, I began my first attempt to find at least one recording of every work by Beethoven that I could find.  We're talking about the early 1970's so this was long before the internet.  There were things like the Schwann Catalog and, especially having grown up in a suburb of New Haven and then moving to Philadelphia for four years, I was fortunate in having easy access to what, even for those days, was a multitude of extremely well-stocked record stores but my quest was often slow...especially once all the obvious candidates (symphonies, piano sonatas, string quartets, etc) were represented.  In college, I discovered the now-defunct Musical Heritage Society and some even more-obscure mail-order sources and those helped fill in a lot of the lesser-known pieces (you probably don't care to hear Beethoven's complete works for mandolin and harpsichord but I assure you, there are a number of entries in this category!).

Although the going could be slow, "the hunt" became a major hobby for me for many years (my wife would say that it's still a major hobby for me!).  However, much as I was more than happy to do the research, my student-level of funding, although fairly generous as an undergraduate (thank you, University of Pennsylvania!), did not always provide access to the more esoteric works (I still remember coming across an open-reel tape recording of a private performance of a reconstruction
of Beethoven's unfinished Oboe Concerto (H.12 in the Hess catalog) for the then astronomical price of $49).  Since that was approximately half-a-moth's rent for me...it remained an unobtainable entry in whatever catalog of "recordings-you-didn't-know-existed" and, to this day, I've yet to hear this piece.

By the time I got into graduate school, my record-buying tended to go more broad thand deep (although it was still far from shallow) as I endeavored to learn as much of the classical repertoire (both standard and otherwise) as I could.  It wasn't until fairly recently, after having amassed over 2500 LP's and well over 5000 CD's that I came across, a few years ago, a budget-priced box set of the complete works of Bach.  I know from many years of experience that neither "complete collection" (unless it be something manageable like "Beethoven's Complete Piano Sonatas" or "Complete Symphonies of Schubert") nor "budget box set" tend to bode well for stellar performances but when I found a new (as opposed to used) copy of this 142-CD set for $96 through the Amazon Marketplace, it seemed worth taking a chance.

Brilliant Classics' Complete Bach Edition

Ever since I began playing classical organ in high school (in 1970, of course, that was done with the intent of becoming the next Keith Emerson but that story is better left for a different post!), Bach has been my hands-down, desert-island, "if-I-could-only-hear-the-works-of-a-single-composer-for-the-rest-of-my-life" composer.  Over the decades, I amassed a vast collection of recordings of his music, covering everything from the "make-it-accessible-to-teenagers" approaches of Walter Carlos's Switched-On Bach (and, as much as I respect Carlos's trans-gender life choice, I reject the revisionist history that calls that album the work of Wendy Carlos...he was still Walter then) and Virgil Fox to modern-instrument versions to "authentic-performance" works and even a couple of downright silly things (like the excerpts from the Well-Tempered Clavier arranged for quartet of chromatic harmonicas (which, although I've not heard it in decades, I seem to remember being surprisingly good...if feeling a bit like "Bach goes to Mayberry")).  Still despite my great love for his work and the large number of recordings on both LP and CD, there was just so much of it and there were pieces that I just never got around to buying and so, as much as anything, I picked this up as an inexpensive way to fill in the holes in my collection.

Dutch soprano Marjon Strijk

This was my first introduction to the Dutch label Brilliant Classics and it was a very pleasant surprise!  As it turned out, it arrived at a time when I was doing a fair amount of long-distance driving but, over the course of about 4 months, I worked my way through the entire set, listening to absolutely nothing but Bach until CD142 came out of the player.  I don't think there's any other composer that I could have done this with (and, as I'll discuss further below, I've attempted it with more than a handful of others!).  Although I'd not heard of any of the mostly Dutch performers (either individually or the groups in which they play), not only are they very consistently at least good, many are stellar! In particular, I have to single out soprano Marjon Strijk
who sings on many (but not enough!) of the cantatas...not only is her execution flawless and her musical instincts stunning, her voice is an astonishing mix of the purity of the boy soprano sound that Bach would have known, with the richness and maturity of an adult woman.

Violinist Kristóf Baráti

Another "never-saw-THAT-coming" performance was that of the Partita #2 in D Minor for solo violin (BWV1004).  The famous Chaconne from this suite has always been a bit problematic for me in performance and this is the first recording I ever remember hearing where I was blown away with a sense, not just of the music itself but of how the violinist (Kristóf Baráti) just gets it!







But enough about this wonderful box set.  Perhaps I'll write more about it in another post but, for now, I just want to say that, for no particular reason, I'd not been purchasing CD's for quite a while when I bought what I came to call my "Big Box o'Bach."  My experience with this set was so positive, however, that I found myself revisiting my already sizeable collection of recorded music to see where else I had significant holes.  This, as it turns out, unleashed a frenzy of purchases (amounting to approximately 2000 CD's over the next couple of years...about half-of-which, at the time of this writing, are still in my "next-up" queue!).  The purchases were about 45% classical music (both modern and pre-twentieth century), 45% jazz (primarily 1940's, 50's & early 60's but also reaching out several decades before and after that period) and about 10% (or less) rock and other popular forms.  I won't go into the details of those purchases now but I will say that Brilliant Classics sets showed up repeatedly and probably accounted for at least 300 or 400 disks beyond that Bach Box.  As with Bach, these were mostly intended to fill gaps in the works of composers who were already very well-represented in my collection (Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Mendelssohn) but also a handful of odder little sets that were interesting curiosities to me such as the 9CD set "Richard Strauss - The Complete Chamber Music." This one, oddly, seems not to be listed on the company's web-site and, I have to say, it's one of the few relative disappointments I've had...partly because it's almost exclusively average-quality live performances but also because much of the music is simply arrangements (not always by Strauss himself) of the composer's orchestral works.

One of Brilliant Classics'
odder collections

Still, despite these occasional less-than-stellar collections, my experience with this label has, so far, been very positive.  The performances are mostly good to excellent, many of the works cannot be found elsewhere and these very economical boxes can often be had for about $1-$2 per disk (occasionally even less, as in my initial purchase of the Bach set mentioned above).  Do you really NEED to hear all 385 of Bach's hymn settings which were only ever intended for congregational use?  Probably not and I confess that I DID skip those disks when working my way through the set but at these prices, it's almost like you didn't even pay for these unwanted pieces.  And for every one of these, there could well be a huge surprise.  I, for example, was shocked to realize that after a lifetime of listening to Bach, I had somehow never heard the magnificent St. John Passion and, my gratitude goes out to the folks at Brilliant Classics for this if nothing else!