Cpe Bach Concertos Loffier

Three double concertos for harpsichord by Bach survive, all dating from around 1736, and all arrangements of earlier compositions. BWV 1060 is thought to have originated as a now lost double concerto for oboe and violin, while BWV 1062 is a reworking of the well-loved concerto for two violins. Unlike these two works, BWV 1061 was composed for two harpsichords from the outset, but probably started out as a concerto without orchestral accompaniment – this will have been added later. Performing these works, with a quintet of string players from the Bach Collegium Japan, Masaaki Suzuki is joined by his son Masato. For the present disc Masato Suzuki has also taken a page from Bach’s own book, in arranging the composer’s Orchestral Suite No.1 for two unaccompanied harpsichords.

This recording features concertos for oboe and its alto cousin, oboe d'amore, by Bach and Telemann. The Bach concertos are reconstructed from published harpsichord concertos that Bach is believed to have originally written for oboe and oboe d'amore. The Telemann concertos for these instruments exist in manuscript form.

J.S.Bach - Concertos For Violin, Concerto For Two Violins, Concerto For Violin & Oboe - Josef Suk (1988)
EAC Rip | FLAC (img + cue), LOG | TT 65:32 | Covers (jpg 300 dpi) | RAR 357 MB (3% Recovery)
Supraphon | Czechoslovakia | 11 0642-2 011 | 1988

The soloist in all the concertos of our recording is Josef Suk (1929), the grandson of the composer Josef Suk (1874-1935) and great- grandson of Antonin Dvorak. Since 1954, he has been pursuing an uninterrupted and diversified solo career and has become the most eminent Czech violin virtuoso of his generation. Suk's partner in Bach's Concerto for Two Violins is the Czech violin virtuoso Ladislav Jasek (1929), who has been active in Australia since the early 1970's. The oboe part in the Double Concerto in D minor BWV 1060a is played by Jan Adamus (1951).

Although Bach obviously felt at home composing for the recorder and used it in important works such as the Brandenburg Concertos and several cantatas, he never composed a concerto for solo recorder - in fact, he only wrote original solo concertos for harpsichord and violin.

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

Rivaled only by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Neville Marriner was one of the most important of the early figures who spearheaded the reawakening of modern interest in Baroque and early Classical music. In the 1950s, he founded Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the first British early music ensemble to find a large international audience. Marriner has since become one of the most popular conductors in the world, acclaimed for his interpretations of composers from Bach to Britten.

In the early phase of the movement for authentic period practice, Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert were practically household names – in early music households, anyway – because of their critically acclaimed performances of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and other Baroque composers. These exciting recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos, the orchestral suites, the harpsichord concertos, the violin concertos, and concertos for various instruments were made between 1979 and 1984, so they are a mix of ADD and DDD recordings.

Mozart's view of the music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was wonderfully contradictory: he observed that Bach's music would be considered old-fashioned in his own time, but that "he [Bach] was the father, and we are the children." This set of six CPE Bach symphonies from the early 1770s gives listeners the opportunity to think more deeply on Mozart. Mozart might easily have heard these works, and if music moved in the direction of lightness and grace from Bach's style during Mozart's creative lifetime, one can still hear a lot of CPE. The six symphonies here are not representative of Bach's "Sturm und Drang" style; all but one are in major keys, and even the gracefully chromatic middle movement of the Symphony in B minor, Wq 182/5, is extremely Mozartian.