Bach, C P E: Fantasia in D major, Wq 117/14

In his acclaimed series of C.P.E. Bach's music for solo keyboard, Miklós Spányi has constructed a programme consisting of four sonatas from the 1750's, including the closing Sonata in A major (Wq65/32).

The sonatas are interspersed with a number of shorter pieces: Solfeggios and Fantasias composed mainly to be used in the teaching of Bach's own students.

Particularly interesting is the Fantasia in D major, Wq117/14, an example of Bach's ‘free fantasias’ which is completely unmeasured, requiring the performer to devise his or her own appropriate rhythm in the style of an improvisation.

Of his most recent disc in the series, International Record Review wrote 'Anyone expecting a chaste, Dresden-china simplicity is in for a culture schock as Spányi probes beneath the surface of Bach's highly articulate musical surfaces with a temporal plasticity that creates the impression of living, breathing musical organisms.'

The word liaison can be translated in many ways: affair, affinity, connection, link, relationship, union. The CDs in the Liaisons series each feature two particular composers, enabling us to explore their musical worlds, sources of inspiration and degree of influence. At the same time, the recordings reveal their most conspicuous differences and their common denominators. Some of these composers are not often heard together (for example D. Scarlatti & Bartók or C.Ph.E. Bach & Britten). However, when time barriers and stylistic differences are put aside, many similarities may be discovered: as if the dialect is different, but the language common. On the other hand, composers who we may imagine to be very similar and easy to combine in any programme (for example Schumann & Brahms), reveal a whole new world of diversity and contrast when heard together. Through a careful choice of composers and compositions on each CD, the Liaisons series offers a bright spectrum of colours, variety and dynamic range, challenging the listener anew with every release.

The present third volume combines the very few original works for piano solo by Benjamin Britten with C.Ph.E. Bach's Prussian Sonatas. Britten's pieces, in all their minimalism, "unusual purity" (Arvo Pärt), perfect clarity and sometimes even emotionally restricted formality, contrast with the emerging Sturm und Drang atmosphere of Bach's sonatas, with their freedom and variety of structural design, lucid style, delicate and tender expression, inventiveness and extreme unpredictability. Dejan Lazic