Renowned Bach specialist Ton Koopman (1944) was awarded the 2006 Bach Medal by the city of Leipzig 05 Jun 2006, the final day of this year's annual Leipzig Bach Festival. The award honors the significant contribution of the 61-year-old Dutchman to Bach performance and scholarship. Koopman performed at the festival, which is run in conjunction with the Bach-Leipzig Archive, with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra.
Between 1999 and 2004, Koopman, a conductor, musicologist, organist, and harpsichordist, recorded the complete cantatas by Johann SeBastian Bach with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir, which he founded in 1979. This twenty-second and last volume of cantata recordings contains two of Bach's latest cantatas (BWV 30 and 80), including the secular model for BWV 30 and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach's arrangement of two movements from BWV 80 dating from after 1750. Also included are the four Kyrie-Gloria masses of the late 1730s; they are very closely associated with the cantata repertoire of the 1720s. These masses are based on selected movements of cantatas dating from the period 1723-6; after an interval of ten or so years Bach reworked them, in most cases very thoroughly.
There is no need to worry, Ton Koopman has started a new project called Buxtehude.
