J.S. BACH: GOLDBERG VARIATIONS BWV 988 — HELMUT WALCHA, HARPSICHORD

Description: Buy new directly from the label: Helmut Walcha (1907-1991), born in Frankfurt, lost his eyesight after a vaccination as a 19-year-old. Despite his disability, he became as a young musician the assistant to the Thomas Cantor in Leipzig, following J.S. Bach’s steps who had held this position two-and-a-half centuries before. In 1929 he returned to Frankfurt where he would spend the rest of his life as an organist and professor of organ. Generally acknowledged to have been the most important organist of the 20th century, he was especially known for his incomparable interpretation of the organ works of J.S. Bach. That he had a second career as a harpsichordist had not been recognized during his lifetime. After recording Bach’s complete organ works he set out to record the two large keyboard cycles of Bach, the Goldberg Variations and the Well-Tempered Clavier on an Ammer harpsichord, made-to-order by a one-hundred-year old workshop in Thüringen in what was then East Germany. Walcha had secured the co-operation of a recording engineer without peer, Erich Thienhaus (1909-1968). When Walcha’s then record company was not interested in the projects, he switched labels, unwilling to accept the rejection. He was fortunate to have found a partner in Thienhaus who between 1959 and 1961 recorded Walcha’s harpsichord performances on an artistic and technical plane rarely reached by others. Germany’s academy of music recording engineers “Tonmeister-Akademie”, the only facility of its kind in the world, is named after Thienhaus. More than a half-century ago, recording was done on reel-to-reel magnetic tape directly to mono and a bit later to stereo. In the absence of “Dolby”-type noise reduction or any other modern gear, Thienhaus made incredibly clean recordings, full of overtones and dynamic ranges with no perceivable tape hiss or background noise. Thus, Celestial Harmonies who are making these recordings available for the first time ever in most of the world, had not much to do in the process of digitalization, just to preserve it for now but leave it where it had been all along: on a higher plane.

Price: 15 USD

Location: Tucson, Arizona

End Time: 2024-02-27T21:52:44.000Z

Shipping Cost: 4.13 USD