Bach: Cantatas

The Bach cantatas project of Ton Koopman was the first complete recording of all the cantatas, including the 21 secular cantatas. Koopman conducted the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir and guest solo singers. The project began in 1995 and was completed in 2005 on 67 CDs. It was the second recording of the 193 sacred cantatas after the Harnoncourt-Leonhardt Bach cantatas project to use early instruments. Koopman unlike Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt did not use boy choirs, but female sopranos, although Bach would have mainly used boys' voices to perform the soprano lines of his cantatas. Koopman's project started on Erato Records, but was nearly derailed when Warner — which had acquired the Harnoncourt-Leonhardt Bach cantata recordings when it acquired Teldec from Telefunken in 1988 — also acquired Erato, thus making Koopman's new project a duplication within Warner's catalogue. Koopman was initially confident, and the project continued under Warner ownership, but Koopman's project was one of the first cutbacks when Warner Classics scaled down new recordings across its classical music subsidiaries and wound up Erato entirely in 2002. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_ca...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)