Christmas Oratorio in Full Score Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Dover Publications full scores are a boon for music student and others on a budget: Being reprints of old editions free of copyright, they represent the very best value-for-money on the market, even though the newest Urtext scholarship may not be present in them. Most of them are very readable, and indeed holds a high enough quality for anyone.

This publication, however, has a few problems. First of all, the print quality of Dover scores seems to be variable, and this is one of the worse ones. While the note heads themselves are very large and visible, the stems are often halfway removed (in general, the paper quality isn't as good as in most of my other Dover scores, a major point for those of us who like to make notes in our scores). In this music, you can probably predict a note value with reasonable accuracy, but it's still a bit annoying. This edition is a copy of a print from 1856 (just a couple of decades after Mendelssohns famed "rediscovery" of Bach), which not only is very old even for a Dover score, but it also means that quite a few old fashioned idioms are present. First of all, C clefs are used by soprano, alto and tenor, which may pose a problem for some. Another thing entirely is the fact that the edition was printed a century before the period style movement gained any hold, which means that the instrumentation as given in this edition is what would be used in a 19th century performance of the oratorio. Although they have been faithfull when it comes to using archaic oboes (oboe d'amore and oboe d'caccia). The trumpets are, however, assigned to then modern instruments.

The worst part about this score, however, is the fact that while instrumentation varies for each movement, the names of each instrument playing is only mentioned at the beginning of each movement; you'll have to remember for yourself after that. To make matters worse, no bar numbers are added. These kinds of things annoy me quite a bit, as it would have been a very small job for Dover to fix these points, and it would make these scores a lot more practical.

Still, it is a score of an amazing piece of music, it's cheap, and I've yet to find any errors in the music itself. So I would definitely recommend it, but there is at the same time room for improvement.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Christmas Oratorio in Full Score

Product Description:
First produced in Leipzig in 1734-35, Bach's Christmas Oratorio unfolds in a set of six cantatas unified by a Biblical narrative relating the story of the birth of Christ. This masterpiece of sacred music, for centuries a favorite of concert audiences and church congregations throughout the Christmas season, has been reproduced directly from the authoritative Bach-Gesellschaft edition published by Breitkopf & Härtel of Leipzig.

Get 22% OFF

Want to read more honest consumer review about Christmas Oratorio in Full Score now ?