Montserrat Figueras
Hèsperion XXI
Jordi Savall
Alia Vox

A very beautiful CD with Montserrat Figueras as a marvellous soprano soloist in the lamenti, together with Jordi Savall with all his feeling for rhythm and creativity. Jordi and Montserrat belong to the intimate circle of my best friends. I know only a few musicians that I esteem so highly. Making music together with them has always been (and still is) a feast.

Cello Suites
Jaap ter Linden
Harmonia Mundi

All his life these suites have been very dear to Jaap, more than any other music. He performs this music in a unique way on beautiful historical instruments. His playing is a dancing delight. An underestimated cellist.

BACH

The Complete Cantatas
The Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir
Ton Koopman
Erato

It is impossible to make a choice if one is involved in such an enormous project to record (and to perform in concert) the complete Bach cantatas, secular as well as sacred. This is a co-operation between friends on the highest level; the love for this genial music radiates. A project of eleven years duration and the end is nearing too soon! I feel privileged to perform Bach’s works with such high quality musicians. A Bach with many different faces: tender, religious, richly colourful, rhythmically alive, love, a sense of freedom, improvisation, and guts without aggression. Bach has been truly magnanimous!

HAYDN

título
Piano Trio’s Tini Mathot
Andrew Manze
Jaap ter Linden
Erato

The only CD for which I have just been the producer. Normally my wife Tini produces mine! Together with technician Adriaan Verstijnen, Tini, with her flawless ear in combination with a lot of patience, takes care of all my recordings. During this recording I realized how difficult it is to be an ideal producer, as she is for me. Tini plays the fortepiano, approaching the instrument from the world of the harpsichord (in my strong opinion the only correct way), which makes her playing unique and spiritual. She is very, very musical, as can be heard on this disc.

BACH

The Goldberg Variations
Gustav Leonhardt
Teldec

Gustav Leonhardt has recorded the marvelous Goldberg Variations 3 or 4 times. His very old recording [8573-81143-2] on a copy of a Dulcken instrument made me decide to study the harpsichord... with him! A beautiful sound and lovely rhetoric à la Leonhardt. More-over a magnificent harpsichordist.

MERULA

Arie e Capricci
Montserrat Figueras
Astrée

This is Montserrat in the repertoire that suits her so well and in which nobody can equal her (as in the first recording of my list). She made this recording together with a basso continuo “dream-team”: my colleagues Hopkinson Smith and Andrew Lawrence-King.

BACH

Complete Organ Works
Ton Koopman
Teldec

Again impossible to make a choice from the recordings of this voluminous project, a series of 16 CD’s. It remains a breathtaking experience to follow a genius like Johann Sebastian Bach from his first (even for Bach insecure) steps as a composer, whilst absorbing the influences of his predecessors and contemporaries up to the ultimate master that he would become. As an interpreter of his music I am challenged to deal with the stylus phantasticus, the most engrossing and daring compositions. I was free to choose the most beautiful historical organs and the recording team has done an astounding job. I recognise myself as a non-mainstream organist with historical techniques.

SATIE

Early Piano Works
Reinbert de Leeuw
Philips Classics

Being on my desert island, the incredible solitude of this music will speak to me all the more! Reinbert is an intensely musical pianist who loves 20th century music as much as I love that of the 17th and 18th centuries.

SCHUBERT

Winterreise
Christoph Prégardien
Andreas Staier
Teldec

Hardly anybody knows that I have secretly accompanied Schubert Lieder on the piano several times. Such beautiful music by a composer who died too young! Christoph (my favorite Evangelist) and Andreas (my former harpsichord student) in a superb interpretation.

ALFRED DELLER SINGS BACH

Aldred Deller
Gustav Leonhardt
Nikolaus Harnoncourt
Vanguard

Recently re-released on CD. The Agnus Dei from the B Minor Mass and the Cantata BWV 170 still especially move me. While listening to this old recording you understand what was meant in the 18th century manuals: if you need a good example you should listen to really great singers. Without Alfred Deller the early music would not have had such a spectacular revival!