CPE Bach Sonatas for Keyboard and Violin Rachel Podger (violin), Kristian Bezuidenhout (fortepiano) Channel Classics CCSSA41523 (CD/SACD) 73:01 mins
Had JS Bach lived another 15 years what would he have made of his son CPE’s four sonatas for keyboard and violin written in 1763? The musical world they inhabit is some distance from that of the G minor Sonata H542.5 which opens this album – a sonata once thought to be by ‘Papa’ Bach but now considered likely to be a collaborative effort. Across the later sonatas Kristian Bezuidenhout and Rachel Podger savour the qualities of coaxing, pleading, playfulness and arresting quirkiness that signal their identification with the so-called Empfindsamer Stil. But nothing is ever cut and dried. The keyboard opening of the B minor Sonata, composed some three decades after its G minor cousin, sounds like a throwback to the teenage work. And, rich in Empfindsamer fingerprints, the Arioso with five variations proves to be a 1780 respray of an earlier work.
At one level, Bezuidenhout and Podger help to pinpoint the chronology, allotting a handsome-sounding copy of an 1805 Walther fortepiano to the later works and a Taskin-inspired harpsichord to the products of the 1730s. It’s just one example of the thoughtfulness with which they approach a set of performances that are as equally persuasive in the bustling, youthful incisiveness of the G minor and D major Sonatas, as in the pristinely-paced, probingly expressive whimsy of the Arioso. Their music-making is infectiously spontaneous yet tellingly ‘considered’ – seamless rapport and impeccably-judged articulation delighting in a stream of illuminating felicities. CPE Bach’s free-spirited sonatas have surely found their free-spirited match.
Paul Riley