Bach, C P E: Sonata in A major (Prussian Sonata No. 6), H.29 (W.48/6)

C.P.E. Bach was a chamber musician at the court of Frederick the Great for nearly three decades. He was also one of the greatest keyboard players in Europe. His compositional mastery is exemplified by the six ‘Prussian’ Sonatas of 1742, works of great expression and stylistic interest. His desire to explore ‘musical speech’ was accompanied by bold contrasts, tremendous dynamism, and acute sensitivity for the shaping of slow movements.

These reveal his inventive, forward-thinking harmonies that both acknowledge the past but also strike out in vivid new directions.

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.

Rising star Ana-Marija Markovina gives insightful and technically brilliant performances of the Prussian Sonatas. She is joined by the Berlin Chamber Orchestra and conductor Federico Longo for a live performance of CPE Bach’s Piano Concerto. Legendary pianist Paul Badura-Skoda considers Markovina to be of the “most important pianists of her generation.”

Fifth son of Johann Sebastian Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel was in his time even more celebrated than his father.

His style developed during his long lifetime (1714-1788), more and more abandoning the Baroque counterpoint. New ways of musical expression were found, called “Empfindsamkeit” and “Sturm und Drang”, in which the human emotions are vividly expressed in quickly changing moods and daring harmonic shifts.

The famous Preussische und Württembergische Sonaten form a landmark of a style changing from Baroque to the Classical Era. Pieter-jan Belder has a special feeling for these quirky and capricious works, keeping form and content firmly together. His extensive discography for Brilliant Classics contains nearly all Bach works, the complete Scarlatti Sonatas, and the complete harpsichord works of Ramea.

The keyboard sonatas of C.P.E. Bach (1714–1788) bear the hallmarks of a composer who lived through a significant moment in musical history; the fifth child of J.S. Bach, not only was Carl Philipp Emanuel employed at the court of Frederick the Great – whose patronage and amateur music making remain legendary to this day – he composed his works during the transition from the Baroque to the Classical period. His keyboard sonatas, in particular, are musical landmarks that epitomise the style and values of an era. The Preussische and Württembergische Sonatas, collected together on this splendid new 3-disc set, exemplify C.P.E. Bach’s celebrated style of composition, while revealing the impact of the period’s stylistic influences. The Empfindsamkeit and Sturm und Drang movements, in particular, can be heard in the music’s thrilling and unexpected changes of mood, emphasis on expression, daring approach to harmony and diminishing reliance on traditional counterpoint.

Although there are traces of the earlier style, brought to its perfection by Carl Philipp Emanuel’s father, the Preussische and Württembergische sonatas demonstrate a determined shift towards a new style, prefiguring the Classical era. Given an expert performance by the awardwinning harpsichordist and clavichord player Pieter-Jan Belder, whose interpretations highlight the expressive qualities and shifting moods of the music, these sonatas give a compelling insight into the transition from the Baroque era to the Classical period, and into a composer who was at the forefront of the stylistic movements of his day.