Bach,C.P.E. / Spanyi - C.P.E. Bach: Solo Keyboard Music, Vol. 32 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

As Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach published successive collections of the Kenner und Liebhaber series, he explored new genres and styles. In the second collection he added his idiosyncratic rondos, and in the fourth he included free fantasias. The fifth collection, composed between 1779 and 1784, contains no new genres, but displays more variety in terms of textures and thematic ideas than any of the previous volumes. In fact, Bach's preoccupation with variation is almost obsessive - it is as if he cannot finish phrases without varying either texture, tonality, rhythmic pulse or dynamics. To the six Sonatas, Rondos and Fantasias that make up the collection, Miklos Spanyi adds two independent works. Bach initially composed 17 variations on the folk-like tune Ich schlief, da traumte mir in 1752 (included in Vol. 19 of this series) but returned to it almost twenty years later, publishing seven new variations. Closing the album is another set of variations, now on an original theme, an Arioso sostenuto in A major. Miklos Spanyi began his survey of the Kenner und Liebhaber collections on the clavichord but the following releases have featured the tangent piano. And 35 albums into this monumental series, individual volumes are still being warmly greeted, for instance on EarlyMusicReview. Com where the reviewer of Volume 32 (BIS-2205) professed to be 'invariably struck not only by the originality of C. P. E. Bach's keyboard writing, but also the high level of performance consistently maintained by Miklos Spanyi. '

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was more systematic than many of his composer colleagues when it came to keeping track of his own works and made at least two catalogues of his compositions for solo keyboard. At various times he also destroyed manuscripts that remained in his possession, especially those of early works. But even so, there are a number of pieces that slipped through the net, and several of them can be found on this album. A few of them were included anonymously into the second Clavierbuchlein for Anna Magdalena Bach, while Emanuel Bach was still living in his father's home in Leipzig. Among the pieces are some that have been identified as being by Bach only recently, during the ongoing work of producing a printed edition of the composer's complete works. As devised by Miklos Spanyi, the programme is a colourful mix of brief dance movements and other miniatures, provides both variety and insights into the formative years of the composer. It ends with Bach's Variations on a Menuet by Locatelli, the most technically demanding of his variation sets composed in 1735 when he was a young man of 21.

Bach,C.P.E / Spanyi - Solo Keyboard Music 34 [COMPACT DISCS] date 01/05/2018