Philipp Moffitt

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.

The Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century continues true to it's original guiding spirit, with a new recording of the six Hamburg Symphonies, Wq 182 by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. This second son of JS Bach, Carl Philipp has sometimes had a rough ride with posterity (and with some of his contemporaries too). Although overshadowed later by Haydn and Mozart - albeit admired by the pair - and overshadowed in his lifetime by Handel, he remains a crucial link between the Baroque and the Classical, particularly for the ultra-sensitive style, his Empfindsamkeit.

Philipp Scharwenka (1847-1917) gets short shrift next to his more successful brother, Xaver. The two had very dissimilar styles. Philipp, a professor at various conservatories (Otto Klemperer was his pupil) was austere and embraced academic German Romanticism, while Xaver preferred the extroverted salon idiom of Chopin and Liszt. In the opinion of the critic Hugo Leichtentritt “Philipp Scharwenka is an absolute master of composition. His violin and cello sonatas, his string quartets, piano trios and piano quintet belong to the most perfect and tonally beautiful works of their type."

This album is a story of family and friendship. Positioned between homage to a father figure and modernity, the viola da gamba sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach are a revealing element in the history of the Bach family and its ties of friendship with two families of virtuoso instrumentalists, the Abels and the Hesses, who had already inspired the work of Johann Sebastian.

Voice, guitar and alto saxophone in intimate, sensitive interplay. And music full of warmth, depth and with surprising twists.