We have been assembling the discs, booklets, and packs for our next Hyphen Press Music CD, ‘Musical offering’, to be released on 26 May (in the UK, and a week later in continental Europe). This will be an unusual CD in the series: devoted to one work, with just one other piece (a trio sonata by Buxtehude) added in The Bach Players’ spirit of providing context and variety. J.S. Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer is one of his major pieces, recorded many times. In this recording, the parts of the work – sometimes assumed to have been assembled arbitrarily to suit the music’s first printer – are played here in an order that supports their rhetorical unfolding. Silas Wollston, the groups’ keyboardist, explains this in his essay ‘Bach the orator’, given in the CD booklet. The cover image on the packet comes from Adolph Menzel’s historical painting (1850–2) of the scene of the Musikalisches Opfer (1747). For the first time we have used four-colour printing for the booklet, to do justice to Menzel’s painting. For the packet, as with the rest of the series, we have stuck with two colours.