Once valued even higher than his father J.S. and revered by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the music of C.P.E. Bach has since become the preserve of musicologists and specialists. Highly regarded for bringing early and unknown music by Haydn to light, Manfred Huss has also been a long-time C.P.E. Bach champion; the present disc combines the prestigious Pasticcio-Preis awarded recordings that he made with his Haydn Sinfonietta Wien in 2005-06.

Ronald Brautigam's performance on the previous volume in this series was described in the International Record Review as 'remarkably full-blooded and forceful playing, pushing the instrument to its limits yet always securing a rich and well-rounded tone'. With the present disc, consisting of sonatas from Beethoven's middle period, Brautigam continues his survey of Beethoven's piano music on a new instrument, a copy of a Graf 1819 fortepiano, which corresponds to the greater demands in terms of power and dynamics made by works such as the Waldstein and the Appassionata. Beethoven's middle period began shortly after a personal crisis brought on by the composer's encroaching deafness, and during it he began to push the borders between free expression and strict form to an even greater extent than previously. In their glowing reviews of previous volumes, many critics have commented precisely on Ronald Brautigam's ability to bring out the radical aspects of the works. According to the reviewer in The Times, 'Beethoven the revolutionary comes closer than ever in Brautigam's fiery interpretations', and his colleague in Süddeutsche Zeitung agreed: 'One has almost the impression of being a contemporary of Beethoven's: one of the first, infinitely startled - not to say shocked - witnesses to this music.'

Described in Gramophone as ‘one of the most needed and important recording projects in progress today’, this series has up until now featured the clavichord, the tangent piano, and the fortepiano. It is therefore something of an occasion when Miklós Spányi for his Volume 37 chooses to perform on a harpsichord. In doing so he reminds us of C.P.E. Bach’s own advice to keyboard players to have both a clavichord and a harpsichord in order to play ‘all sorts of things alternating’ (‘allerley Sachen abwechselnd’). But the album – which includes some of the composer’s earliest works – also features one of the very few, if not the only, compositions that Bach specifically dedicated to the harpsichord, namely the Sonata per il cembalo a 2 tastature. In it, Bach makes colorful use of the instrument by specifying various detailed and idiosyncratic harpsichord registrations. Spányi also performs two of the few fugues – in F and A major respectively – that Carl Philipp composed: besides the general shift in fashion away from intricate counterpoint to melodic simplicity, it is possible that he found father Johann Sebastian’s achievements in that particular genre too hard an act to follow.

This new release is the latest installment in Miklos Spanyi’s series of the keyboard music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. The works on this volume include some of CPE Bach’s most celebrated works. The six collections “fur Kenner und Liebhaber” were published between 1779 and 1787. Roughly translated as “connaisseurs and amateurs,” the collections were composed for the enjoyment of both the musically trained and untrained. Spanyi has decided to combine works from both collections for this volume, and performs them on the clavichord. The next volume will complete these collections, and will be performed on the tangent piano. Spanyi’s prior installments in this series have been called an “illuminating journey through the keyboard landscape of JS Bach’s best-known son” (BBC Music Magazine) and “one of the most needed and important recording projects in progress today.” (Gramophone)

On this amply filled album, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Clavierstücke verschiedener Art (Keyboard Pieces of various Kinds) is presented in its entirety, with the exception of three songs for voice and keyboard. This collection is the most diverse of Bach’s publications and includes multi-movement genres, a free fantasia, a learned fugue, and various short pieces of varying degrees of difficulty. The variety suggests that Bach did not want for his keyboard music to be strictly divided into ‘light’ and ‘serious’ pieces. But he also wished to demonstrate a wide range of techniques of keyboard composition and performance: orchestral writing in the symphony and the concerto, two-part textures in the sonata, polyphony in the fugue, and free and virtuosic composition in the fantasias and solfeggios. In order to bring a similar variety to his recording of the collection, Miklós Spányi has chosen to perform the pieces on a harpsichord built after the Antwerp maker Joannes Daniel Dulcken. To this double-manual harpsichord offering a wide range of possible registrations, Spányi has added a so-called swell device which facilitates quick dynamic changes. This makes it possible to bring out the contrasts between orchestral and soloistic textures in the Concerto in C major, but also to highlight the different characters in the contrasting pairs of Minuets.

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, Miklós Spányi adds two independent works. Bach initially composed 17 variations on the folk-like tune Ich schlief, da träumte 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. Miklós Spányi 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 Miklós Spányi.’