Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Cembalosonaten Wq.48 Nr.2,4,6;Wq.52 Nr.1;Wq.65 Nr.17 auf CD

Kompositorische Vielseitigkeit
1773 äußerte sich der Musikhistoriker Charles Burney zu den Werken Carl Philipp Emanuel Bachs und beschrieb sie als »außerordentlich, reich an Eingebung, Geschmack und Gelehrtheit.« Auch andere Zeitgenossen rühmten den zweitältesten Sohn Johann Sebastian Bachs für seine kühnen und ungewöhnlichen musikalischen Ausdrucksweisen. Danny Driver, englischer Pianist stellt aus den 300 Werken für Tasteninstrumente von Carl Philipp Emanuel fünf Sonaten heraus, die die kompositorische Vielseitigkeit des Cembalisten und späteren Musikdirektors in Hamburg demonstrieren.

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The pianist Danny Driver has garnered the highest possible praise for his two York Bowen discs on Hyperion. Now, demonstrating his extraordinary versatility, he turns to a composer from a very different age—yet one who has been similarly overlooked by the musical establishment, while always having a place in the heart of connoisseurs of arcane keyboard music.

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714–1788), second son of Johann Sebastian, was both revered and criticized by his contemporaries for his bold departures from conventional modes of musical expression. He perfected a highly original and intensely personal compositional style known as the empfindsamer Stil (literally, the ‘sensitive style’). As the works on this recording show, Bach’s approach to musical expressiveness found voice in frequent mood changes, abundant rests and ‘sighing’ motifs, the juxtaposition of contrasting rhythmic figures, deceptive cadences, and dramatic, rhetorical harmonic interjections. Bach became particularly renowned for his ability to improvise fantasias—seemingly free-form, stream-of-consciousness flights of fancy characterized by unmeasured rhythm and distant harmonic excursions. Yet underlying even the most improvisatory of his compositions is a coherent structure.

Emanuel Bach’s music breaks dramatically away from, yet also builds upon, the early eighteenth-century style perfected by his father. His compositions mark one of the first—and among the most inspired—repudiations of the baroque aesthetic, in which a single unified mood dominates each movement. Emanuel Bach composed more than three hundred keyboard works during his lifetime—all of the works on this recording were composed during the 1740s, while in the service of King Frederick II of Prussia.

Rezensionen

'Listening to this extraordinary music, it is easy to understand why the audiences who first heard it in the 1740s were thrilled and bewildered in equal measure … Driver meets the interpretative challenges with a lively mind, dexterity and warm sensibility in a way that brings CPE Bach's startling originality sharply into focus' (The Daily Telegraph)

'With 78 minutes of impeccable pianism, top-drawer recording quality and highly informative notes by Leta Miller, placing these remarkable works in context, this deserves a wide audience' (International Record Review)