Search - Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Budapest Concerto Armonico, Miklós Spányi :: C.P.E. Bach: The Complete Keyboard Concertos, Vol. 12

A different musical place

John Willoughby | Amherst, MA | 01/13/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I don't know if it's just me and my personal listening history, but CPE Bach seems so fresh and unexpected in the way he develops his themes. I have a certain behavioural pattern when buying discs from this large series featuring Spanyi on the tangent piano, and it goes like this:



buy disc, listen to it and decide that it's not as good as the last one, put it aside for a few days



listen again, decide that it's really pretty good after all



listen a bit more and decide that it's actually the best one yet, that it fools me delightfully in the way that the phrases are finished, and in breaking it's own rules, in the key changes



listen to the disc obsessively, marvelling at the incredible structure, the variety of the concertos



decide I must try just one more from the series



buy disc, listen to it and decide that it's not as good as the last one....



So it takes me a while to be able to follow the ideas in CPEB's concertos, there is often something that bothers me about them at first (see my review for #14 in the series), but then it clicks and I realize that the failure is mine. The tangent piano seems to be a perect choice for these pieces - the sound is delicate, yet it's able to muscle it's way to the fore when required. This whole series seems to be of consistently high quality - I have #7, #11, #12 and #14, and they are all wonderful.



highly recommended."