Keyboard Rich

Pianist David Fray already enjoys a fine reputation as a stylish Bach player—elegant, focused, and alive to the rich fantasy that underlies so much of the music. Here, joined by Renaud Capuçon, he plays four of the six sonatas for violin and keyboard with a winning restraint and a songful beauty. Fray is wonderful at the fast-flowing counterpoint, his fingers skipping over the keys and making magic happen. Yet in a movement such as the “Adagio ma non tanto” of the Third Sonata, these two players find a stillness and poise that melts the heart. Heavenly music making.

CPE Bach (second son of JSB) offers so much more than eccentricity and in this recital of five sonatas Danny Driver, a recent addition to Hyperion’s bejewelled roster of pianists, makes his superlative case for music that is as inventive as it is unsettling. Playing with imperturbable authority, he captures all of the mercurial fits and starts of the G minor Sonata (H47) – almost as if Bach were unable to decide on his direction. And here, in particular, you sense Haydn’s delight rather than censure in such a startling and adventurous journey. The strange, gawky nature of the third movement even anticipates Schumann’s wilder dreams and, dare I say it, is like a prophecy of Marc-André Hamelin’s trickery in his wicked take on Scarlatti (also on Hyperion, 12/01). Again, the beguiling solace of the central Adagio is enlivened with sufficient forward-looking dissonance to take it somehow out of time and place. In the Adagio of the A major Sonata (H29) gaiety quickly collapses into a Feste-like melancholy, though even Shakespeare’s clown hardly sings more disquietingly of life’s difficulties. The finale from the same Sonata has a mischievous feline delicacy; and if the last three sonatas on this recital are more conventional, they are still subject to all of Bach’s mood-swings