Music and Vinyl: J.S.Bach - Brandenburg Concerto No.5

I've already posted three of J.S.Bach's ever-popular Brandenburg Concertos here - two from Nikolas Harnoncourt's Concentus Musicus Wien original instrument ensemble, no.4 and no.6 - and no.3 from a small modern instrument orchestra The Virtuosi Of England. Both groups, but especially Harnoncourt's, adhere to what Sir Adrian Boult calls in his preface to this 1973 set of the concertos as the "Bach-as-he-did-it-himself cult".

What today we term HIP - or historically informed performance - was something that seemingly didn't appeal to Sir Adrian, though paradoxically we do get a kind of HIP approach to the Brandenburgs in this set. The "historial" in this case being going back to the approach to Bach performances of the early 1900s that Sir Adrian experienced and remembered well (unlike the usual HIP approach of assumptions and conjecture of what earlier performances sounded like).

So here we have the fifth Brandenburg Concerto with the full strings of the London Philharmonic providing a depth and sonority that's mostly lacking from the modern HIP sound, though it has to be said at the expense of some inner clarity of parts. I can't help thinking that Bach would have probably revelled in the sound of the modern symphony orchestra had it been available to him.