Karl Richter’s interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach’s choral masterworks are landmarks in the history of recorded music. When they were first issued in the 1950s and 1960s they documented a completely fresh style of interpreting this great composer’s music, far away from the Romantic tradition that was then dominating.

Against the background of dramatic shifts in Baroque performance practice, Richter remained steadfast to his own tenets of strict tempi and expressive intensity. His was a ''de-romanticized'' Bach that brought a new vitality to the works and reduced the number of performing musicians to correspond more closely to the composer's original forces and which devoted much attention to the woodwinds and to balance. For many music lovers, Karl Richter remains above all a charismatic choral conductor whose recordings of Bach’s great Passions, Cantatas and B Minor Mass left their mark on an entire generation across the world; an impact due not least to the very specific sound of his Munich Bach Choir.