Martin Amis Interessengebiet

If you asked a music-lover in Haydn or Mozart's time about the works of Bach, you would have been referring to CPE, and not his dad, the great JS, whose reputation was merely that of a great organist and sometime composer of "historical" music. Not only was CPE universally admired in his lifetime, he also wrote the definitive treatise on contemporary keyboard technique (it's still in use today), collected fine art, and left a superb body of music to future generations. The symphonies are really exciting pieces full of unpredictable turns of phrase and a genuinely passionate emotional expression. These excellent performances make the best possible case for them.

The present richly enjoyable CD contains five trios by Johann Gottlieb and Carl Heinrich. In some areas of the brothers’ work it is near enough impossible to know who wrote what with any certainty – as Grove puts it “problems of attribution, chronology and biographical detail remain”. Manuscript attributions usually refer simply to ‘Graun’.

It was only when Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was appointed Musikdirektor in Hamburg that he started to compose a large amount of religious music. This, of course, was part of his job, but the fact that he had applied for this job is an indication that he didn't see any problem in writing music for the church and for specific occasions. It has taken a long time before the religious repertoire of Emanuel has been taken seriously, and it still doesn't belong to the core of religious music performed by today's choirs and orchestras.