The well-known painting of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach reproduced on the cover of this CD must be one of the most immediately attractive composer portraits ever made. The wide-brimmed hat, the fur-lined coat, the wisp of steely hair and, above all, the reddened but unmistakably genial face (displaying, if I’m not mistaken, his father’s nose) suggest a man one would want to accompany straightaway to the nearest coffee-house. But Friedemann was actually a little more complex than that, both as a person who could be lazy and argumentative and as a talented musician torn between the styles of the late baroque and early classical periods, so it is perhaps no surprise to find that there is considerable variety in the music on this disc. The opening Sinfonia in D major is one of those sunnily optimistic works that revel in the splendid new sound of the classical orchestra, but the D minor Sinfonia which follows is a highly serious piece for church use, containing a solemnly drooping fugue. There is also an Ouverture-Suite once attributed (pretty implausibly) to Johann Sebastian which, though undeniably attractive and individual, is now thought unlikely to be by Friedemann either; a quirkily expressive but perhaps rather rambling harpsichord concerto; and a by-now familiarly protean and surprise-filled Sinfonia in F major.

Tafelmusik are the perfect ensemble to perform this music. Like much of it, they delight in sheer orchestral sound, enjoying the advantage themselves of being able to turn it out in particularly pleasing and well-finished form. I would not hesitate to recommend this disc to any lover of eighteenth-century orchestral music.

-- Lindsay Kemp, Gramophone [2/1998]