With this exemplary set, Brilliant Classics has formed a vivid picture of the composer Dietrich Buxtehude across the most important sectors of his output, drawing on a rich back catalogue crowned with new recordings.

More than half of the set is devoted to the ambitious, monumental recording cycle of the complete keyboard music on 10 CDs undertaken by organist–harpsichordist and label stalwart Simone Stella in 2010–11. This pride of place for the solo keyboard is natural considering Buxtehude’s own prodigious gifts as a performer on the instruments – and it is this repertoire, through its ease of dissemination, that exerted his compositional influence most widely on the generations to come, which included the great J.S. Bach and G.F. Handel, born almost 50 years later.

But his works in vocal idioms were equally ground-breaking. For this, Brilliant have licensed important sets from 1996 and 2000 of cantatas for small and larger forces originally issued on the Dacapo label, of Buxtehude’s native Denmark, featuring the great Emma Kirkby and Danish bass Johan Reuter, as well as a 2002 Canadian recording of cantatas for one, two and three soloists from Naxos. Brilliant Classics supplement these treasures with a vocal gem in their own catalogue: Buxtehude’s great cycle of seven cantatas, Membra Jesu nostri, in a 2021 recording by Groningen’s Luthers Bach Ensemble.

Finally, the chamber music is offered in a new release from Amsterdam-based ensemble Fantasticus, recorded in 2023 and comprising the Trio Sonatas, opp. 1 & 2, with an addendum of sonatas in manuscript, on 3 CDs.