Notes and Editorial Reviews
"Performance: *****/Sound: ***** Even by Emanuel Bach’s standards, the Symphonies in E flat and E minor, both dating from the late 1750s, are disturbingly outré. With their obsessively driven tuttis, breaking off for fragile wisps of cantabile, and their weird harmonic and rhythmic dislocations, they constantly threaten chaos. Both first movements sound like music on the edge of a nervous breakdown; the slow movements exude the edgy, self-communing pathos characteristic of Bach’s Empfindsamkeit; and only the finales suggest anything approaching stability. The Berlin players rightly go for broke in this astonishing music, attacking the fast movements with tigerish energy, mining the vein of acute sensibility in the slow ones, and playing up
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Bach’s bizarre, disorientating contrasts for all they’re worth. The two earliest works on this disc – the G major Symphony and the C major Keyboard Concerto – are the most ‘normal’, though with Emanuel Bach normality is only relative: the Concerto, in particular, is a wayward, highly strung piece, with a broodingly introspective Adagio full of tortuous chromaticism. Raphael Alpermann, playing on an attractive copy of a German 18th-century harpsichord, is an eloquent soloist here. In the more familiar A minor Cello Concerto Peter Bruns, with his grainy, plangent tone, may lack the sheer abandon that Anner Bylsma (on Virgin) brings to this music; but he phrases imaginatively and scores over Bylsma with his spot-on intonation and adroit despatch of Bach’s low-lying toccata figuration. For a cross-section of orchestral works by one of music’s great eccentrics, you won’t do better than this." -- Richard Wigmore, BBC Music Read less
Works on This Recording
1.
Sinfonia in E flat major, Wq 179/H 654 by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach
Performer:
Peter Bruns (Cello)
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Academy for Ancient Music Berlin
Period: Classical
Written: 1757-1762; Berlin, Germany
Length: 10 Minutes 23 Secs.
2.
Concerto for Harpsichord in C major, Wq 20/H 423 by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach
Performer:
Raphael Alpermann (Harpsichord)
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Academy for Ancient Music Berlin
Period: Classical
Written: 1745-1747; Berlin, Germany
Length: 24 Minutes 23 Secs.
3.
Sinfonia in E minor, Wq 178/H 653 by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Academy for Ancient Music Berlin
Period: Classical
Written: ?1756; Berlin, Germany
Length: 10 Minutes 25 Secs.
4.
Concerto for Cello no 1 in A minor, Wq 170/H 432 by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach
Performer:
Peter Bruns (Cello)
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Academy for Ancient Music Berlin
Period: Classical
Written: ?1750; Berlin, Germany
Length: 24 Minutes 34 Secs.
5.
Sinfonia in G major, Wq 173/H 648 by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Academy for Ancient Music Berlin
Period: Classical
Written: 1741; Berlin, Germany
Length: 7 Minutes 29 Secs.
Featured Sound Samples
Sinfonia in E flat, Wq 179: I. Prestissimo
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