Heinrich Bach: Sonatas & Organ Works [DSD EP]

Heinrich Bach: Sonatas & Organ Works is a specially priced DSD EP that forms part of the final instalment of the complete works of Bach’s ancestors, to be released in its entirety in October 2026.

Heinrich Bach (1615–1692), great-uncle of Johann Sebastian Bach, spent the greater part of his career as organist in Arnstadt, where he served the Liebfrauenkirche and Oberkirche. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach described him as “a good composer and a man of quick wit” — though like so many organist-composers of his era, much of his art lived and died in improvisation, leaving only the slenderest of paper trails. Just three organ chorales survive, preserved almost by accident in 19th-century anthologies: Erbarm dich mein, traced back through August Gottfried Ritter to a collection by Johann Gottfried Walther; Christ lag in Todesbanden, known from two manuscript sources; and Da Jesus an dem Kreuze Stund, long misattributed to Pachelbel but stylistically closer to Heinrich’s own archaic idiom.

Equally rare are the two sonatas for five instruments, the only known contributions to ensemble music by a composer of his Bach-family generation. Preserved in the celebrated Partiturbuch Ludwig — a manuscript compiled in 1662 for Duke August II of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel — they sit alongside works by Schmelzer and Bertali, following the mid-17th-century convention of freely alternating duple and triple time, slow and fast. Attribution remains an open question, as sources from the Archbishop of Kroměříž’s library assign the same works to Schmelzer.

Clematis
Stéphanie de Failly & Amandine Solano: violins
Ellie Nimerosky & Jorlen Vega-Garcia: violas
Mathurin Matharel: bass violin
Brice Sailly: harpsichord
Cindy Castillo: organ