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You might not guess just from its title that this release treads the mid-18th-century gully between the Baroque and Classical period uplands. But then this programme focuses not on the polite conversations of the galant but firmly on the fidgety, angst?y manner known as Empfindsamkeit developed by the North German keyboard composers of the mid-18th century, of whom Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach is the most familiar representative. That style – sometimes frenetic and hard-driven, sometimes still and intensely lyrical, but ever likely to change direction on a sixpence – is not hard to recognise or categorise, yet the beauty of this album is that it presents not as a history lesson but as a real celebration of the freedom with which these composers pursued personal expression in an age when (as Francesco Corti writes in his booklet note) ‘a new artistic priority was identified in the continuous oscillation between different and contrasting moods’.
CPE Bach is a must, of course, present here in two unusual harpsichord solos: a beautiful Andante section taken from one of his experimental patchwork sonatinas of the 1760s, eloquently spinning a wistful melody over a delicately contoured chordal accompaniment, and a set of variations on the old Folia tune that in its quick-fire parade of empfindsamer stylings seems almost selfmocking. Then there is Emanuel’s brother Wilhelm Friedemann, whose stylistic collisions can seem to approach the schizophrenic. His Sinfonia opens in halting, anxious phrases but then plunges into a rigorous fugue that his famous father might not have disowned, while in the outer movements of his D major Harpsichord Concerto virtuoso confidence is nagged at by distracted expressive asides, all framing a delicately poignant central Andante.
The ‘discovery’ of the disc, however, lies in the pair of excellent concertos by Georg Benda, both as strong in constitution and urgent in expression as anything by CPE Bach, while at the same time also perhaps a little tauter in construction. The energy and drive of their fast movements make them fine concert showpieces, but there is more to them than that. The F minor’s first movement is full of call-andresponse, surprise cadences and punched orchestral chords, that of the B minor stopstart, nervy and capricious, followed by an Arioso slow movement that seems to breathe the melancholy content of whispering forests and fragrant meadows. There is a touch of harpsichord noodling in the finale, but the strings push through to an emphatic finish. he performances are first-rate, perhaps unlikely to be bettered, as we have learned to expect both from Il Pomo d’Oro with their tight, punchy yet sensuously yielding sound, and from Corti, a master harpsichordist whose fingers flicker like lightning but can also shape the instrument’s voice to sing like you never thought possible. Certainly none of the expressive extremes put his way here seem beyond him, and his account of the CPE Bach Andante is a gem to put on repeat for a while. |
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