The best Ave Maria

Vinyl or CD.I really must go beyond the snippets found on the Chill With Bach and Classic FM cds.

Which should I buy?

 

To the best of my knowledge, Bach, being a good Lutheran, never wrote an Ave Maria. I suspect what you've got is the Ave Maria written by 19th century French composer Charles Gounod. Although the melody is Gounod's own, the piece has as its foundation Prelude No.1 from "The well-tempered clavier", Bach's series of pieces written to show off the advantages of the "tempered" scale (the slight rearranging of the values of the notes of the musical scales to allow, among other things, pieces to be easily transposed from one instrument to another). Prelude No.1 itself is a delight as it gradually, subtly shifts its key.

If this is your Ave Maria, I wouldn't have a clue which one is best, as there are sooooo many. Every (wo)man and his or her dog has recorded it, and there are also organ and orcherstral versions. And if it is Gounod's, what you've got is probably all there is of it - it's a single song and not part of a longer piece.

The nearest Bach came to doing anything Marian was to set to music the Magnificat (Mary's song on learning that she would be the mother of the Messiah). According to his sons, he did this several times, but only one has come down to us - but it's a knockout.

 

Yes,the cover just says Bach/Gounod.Thanks,I will stick with that then and try the Magnificat

 

I think this one is a cheapie:



It's an early recording of Gardiner and the Monteverdis, but it's a good 'un. The Magnificat is interesting in its use of leitmotifs, music that reflects the content of the words, a form that Wagner would bring to perfection in his "Ring" operas. For example, the stiff, square fugue of Sicut locustus est ad patres nostros ("As He spake to our fathers before us")representing the old, traditional ways, followed by the threefold Gloria with the high baroque trumpets rising out the choir and soaring into the stratosphere.

It's coupled with a good performance of the virtuoso solo cantata BWV 51, "Jauchet Gott in allen Ländern" (Praise God in all lands). The soloist is a soprano (Emma Kirkby, no less) and she sings with a virtuoso trumpet obbligato that appears in the first and last movements (they had to give the poor dear time to recover).

 

Try Gounod's Faust and the Petit Mass Solemne, which is neither little nor solemn. I'll have a look later for cheap good versions

 

Useful as ever chaps,I will try the recommendations and chastise myself for confusing Bach for a gonad.

 

A possibly very good Ave Maria?

http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/special/?ID=domingo-sacredsongs

Hard to go past Domingo as a singer.