Pulling Out All the Stops

Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, NYC

15,688 equivalent pipes

Józef Kotowicz

John Scott, organist of St. Thomas Church, NYC

Blackburn, Lancashire, UK

In September 2013 we started performing and recording all of Bach’s works. The first recordings were made available on this site on 2 May 2014, followed by a new Bach recording every Friday. Each piece of music by Bach has its own page where site visitors can choose: the recording, interviews, background information or audience reactions. You can watch and listen to every single piece in its entirety. Musicians will talk about what the music does for them. Background information is provided for each work and all the facts about the recording are compactly summarised. The public section of the site has space for reactions from listeners. Why All of Bach? Because the Netherlands Bach Society is looking forward to celebrating its first 100 years in the 2021-2022 season, the idea emerged to perform all of Bach’s work. To stay close to Bach, we shall perform his music in hand-picked locations: cantatas in a church, chamber music in living rooms, and so on. In order to reach as many people as possible, we turned our eyes to the new media. “In this way we can involve people in the way we work and let them discover how you can make Bach sound. It’s a gift to the world. Because whether you live in South Korea and are practising the Minuet in G minor for the first time or you live in Appingedam and are fascinated by four-part fugues, you are just a few mouse clicks away from the information you are looking for,” says our artistic director Jos van Veldhoven. Netherlands Bach Society The Netherlands Bach Society has figured prominently in Dutch cultural life for many years. It started out in 1921 with a plan for a performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the Grote Kerk in Naarden. Our founders purposely chose a church as a pendant to Willem Mengelberg’s performances in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Our ensemble grew into a leading musical society with a flexible basis. We still perform the St Matthew Passion every year in the Grote Kerk in Naarden. In addition, each season we give around fifty concerts all over the Netherlands as well as abroad. Jos van Veldhoven has been the artistic director since 1983.

J.S. Bach:  Komm, süsser Tod (transcription:  Virgil Fox)

Listen to some recordings of some of Cavaillé-Coll's great organs, such as St. Sulpice in Paris and St. Ouen in Rouen here.  More about Cavaillé-Coll on wikipedia.

More Photos and Specification

Zürich, die Schweiz (Switzerland)

Hans-Andre Stamm