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.’

Beethoven wrote sympathetically for the cello throughout his career, from the ardent, lyrical voice of the Op.1 piano trios onwards, and he rarely subjugated the instrument to its basso continuo role still prevalent in the works of Mozart and Haydn. He never contemplated a cello concerto, but his five sonatas, plus sets of crowd-pleasing variations on popular themes by Handel and Mozart, have attracted the great cellists of every era. However, the record catalogue boasts comparatively few period-instrument accounts, made according to the performing principles and bowing of Beethoven’s day, and so this new Brilliant Classics set promises a new and refreshing perspective on some perennially audacious masterpieces. The Op.5 Sonatas are intended to astound as well as to innovate. For the first time in the history of the cello repertoire, both instruments were invested with equal importance. The piano writing is scarcely less bold and quick-thinking, requiring both musicians to turn on a sixpence from soloist to accompanist and back again, emulating the more equal dialogue of a string quartet. Formal novelty is also in evidence, in the expanded slow introductions and then in the four-movement structures of Op.69 and Op.102 No.1. In every way the last sonatas belong to Beethoven’s late period: posing questions to listeners as well as performers with every bar, transcending the limits of the instruments to sing and shout, contemplate and argue. The partnership of Mario Testori and Costantino Mastroprimiano is an experienced one, with a well-received Brilliant Classics album (95023) of late-Classical sonatas by Hummel, Moscheles and Ries to its credit. The pianist also contributes an enlightening booklet essay to this valuable contribution to the Beethoven anniversary year.

The latest volume in a critically acclaimed series presents modern recordings of Dussek’s exhilaratingly diverse cycle of piano sonatas on instruments of his own time.

This enterprising series has reached the trio of ‘Grand Sonatas’ Op. 35, probably first published in 1798, when Dussek dedicated them to Gabrielle Pleyel (wife of the piano manufacturer Ignaz Pleyel) and Muzio Clementi, the composer, publisher, and piano manufacturer who developed new, more powerful-sounding and reliable piano actions. Dussek, like Beethoven, seized on such technological innovation and produced music of new turbulence such as the C minor Sonata Op. 35 No. 3. The sonata’s opening Allegro bursts with vitality and violence, which becomes all the more vivid when played on a piano from Dussek’s time, straining to contain the music’s expressive reach, as it is here.

The instrument used on this album is a 1798 fortepiano from the firm of Longman-Clementi. Accordingly, the touch and sound correspond more closely than any other piano previously used on recordings of this repertoire. Dussek lived in London during the 1790s and worked closely with the manufacturer John Broadwood to extend the range of keyboard instruments. The English fortepiano lent itself naturally to the harmonic fullness of Dussek's preferred textures, and in reverse, the instrument's characteristic sound and touch inspired and shaped the development of Dussek's compositional style.

Op. 69 No. 3 belongs to a collection of sonatas which Dussek composed with an optional violin part. Nos. 1 and 2 in the set have already received historically informed recordings in a separate Brilliant Classics project, with Julia Huber and Miriam Altmann, but this series presents the piano-only version which all the same contains the full argument of the sonata. In partnership with Bart van Oort, Petra Somlai contributed to Volume 9 in this series, which was welcomed in Fanfare magazine with glowing praise: ‘Both musicians have the requisite technique, and their execution of Dussek’s virtuoso writing is impressive… Both artists play with sensitivity and attractive tone. The recorded sound is fine, with admirable warmth and detail.’