Bach (CPE): Cello Concertos - CDA6. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1. ![]() Hyperion Records. But not in 1. 77. J F Reichardt penned these words. ![]() A quarter of a century after his death, Johann Sebastian’s music, while not quite forgotten, seemed marginal or irrelevant. And except perhaps in England, where Sebastian’s youngest son, Johann Christian, held sway, the . This celebration of pure feeling was related to a whole aesthetic movement whose literary manifestations included the novels of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne (to whose antic prose C P E’s music was often compared) and Jean- Jacques Rousseau. The credo of Empfindsamkeit was that music should . In lesser hands this could lead to cloying sentimentality. But in Bach’s finest sonatas and orchestral works, halting, sighing phrases, explosive disruptions and disorienting harmonies combine to produce music unlike anything else composed in the eighteenth century. Born in Weimar, Emanuel grew up in the musically rich atmosphere of Leipzig, where, as he noted in his autobiography of 1. Like Handel and his own godfather Telemann, Emanuel initially studied law. Then, after graduating in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1. Emanuel Bach would remain in his service for nearly thirty years. As harpsichordist at Frederick’s court, first at Ruppin and Rheinsberg, then in Potsdam and Berlin, Emanuel stood some way down the musical pecking order. Above him were Kapellmeister Carl Heinrich Graun and Johann Joachim Quantz, Frederick’s pet flautist- cum- flute- teacher. Quantz was not only paid far more lavishly, but also enjoyed unique powers in the court. A far less compliant personality (not for nothing was he a Bach), Emanuel came to resent both his financial status and the pervasive atmosphere of sycophancy at court. Frederick’s flute playing, which he often accompanied in the nightly chamber concerts, was more than tolerable, though nowhere near as good as the flatterers pretended. During his three decades in Berlin, Bach wrote a fair amount of dispensable . He also composed swathes of harpsichord concertos for his own performance, and a clutch of bold, fiery symphonies. While some of these orchestral works were heard at court, many were probably intended for performance among connoisseurs (Kenner) at Berlin’s concert societies, or . But to regard them as merely . Following the examples of his father’s concertos, many of which were transcribed for different instruments, Emanuel’s three cello concertos also exist in versions for harpsichord and flute. The composer’s entry in his own thematic catalogue (Nachlass- Verzeichniss) lists the concertos as for . While it was long assumed that the harpsichord versions were the originals, the editor of the new C P E Bach Edition, Robert Nosow, has proposed that all three works may have started life as cello concertos. Whatever the truth—and we shall probably never know—Bach’s writing for cello is thoroughly idiomatic. In the A minor (1. B flat major (1. 75. Company - Telephone Products, Fields of specialty City; 10Levels - (972).77.6657171. Network and telecom protocol conformance testing from TCP/IP, DHCP, RFC 1242, RFC. Official Death Grips website with releases, videos, remixes, shows & merch store. Emanuel had surely learned a thing or two from his father’s cello suites). The A major concerto of 1. Largo, making eloquent use of the cello’s plangent upper register. End-Time Pilgrim A scripturally based devotional guide into the 70th Week of Daniel and the climactic final 7 years of this age. How to choose the best exercise music to fill your iPod or MP3 player. When looking for good workout songs, find those that have a distinct rhythm and appropriate. As with so many of his father’s concertos, we can only speculate as to who played Emanuel’s cello concertos. Two possible candidates are the Italian cellist- composer Carlo Graziani, who was active for a time at the Prussian court, and the Bohemian Ignaz Mara, principal cellist in Frederick the Great’s chamber ensemble from the early 1. Cast in the unusual metre of 3/2, the Allegro assai that opens the Cello Concerto in A minor is Bach in impetuous, proto- Sturm und Drang mode. The opening ritornello typically combines fierily striding sequences, quirky rhythmic irregularities and sudden discontinuities. As in the finale of the B flat major concerto, the soloist attempts to bring calm to the fray with an elegiac cantabile (a foretaste here of the opening movements of Mozart’s minor- keyed piano concertos, K4. K4. 91). Equally inevitably, creative conflict between lyricism and turbulence ensues. The cellist later reveals a hectic, percussive side, while the movement’s initial motif—an angular arpeggio figure—is likely to invade the discourse at any moment. In his own cadenza, Nicolas Altstaedt underlines the resemblance between the cello’s opening cantabile and the alto aria . More than once the metre becomes blurred, while the central episode develops into a dramatic dialogue between cello and orchestra. For his finale Bach writes a movement in the style of a quick march. The principal player here is the opening . After the initial ritornello, cello and orchestra work in close collusion developing and elaborating fragments of the ritornello themes. In the central, . In essence the movement is a rhapsodic meditation on the themes announced in the opening ritornello, though the mood is intermittently punctuated by interjections from a spiky little arpeggio figure. Is Bach being ironically humorous here? The closing ritornello drifts from G minor to the dominant of B flat major in preparation for the finale. As if to atone for his unwonted urbanity in the first movement, Bach here reverts to type with music of fizzing, almost manic energy, founded on volleys of repeated notes, sudden hiatuses and unscripted swerves into alien keys. On its initial entry the cello tries to impose a measure of lyrical decorum, before the orchestral strings crash in with the ritornello theme. Thereafter soloist and orchestra constantly collide in a movement that seems calculated to wrong- foot the listener. Even the brief bouts of toccata figuration never quite take you where you expect, as they almost invariably do in Vivaldi. Last of the three to be composed, the Cello Concerto in A major begins with a swashbuckling Allegro whose bounding arpeggio theme is the mainspring of the action. Typically, the cello’s attempts at sustained lyricism are repeatedly threatened by the orchestra’s half- playful, half- nervy interjections. At the start of the central solo episode soloist and orchestra indulge in some jocular banter, turning the arpeggio theme on its head, before the cello plunges into the modulating, toccata- like sequences characteristic of all these concertos. As usual with C P E, a swerve into an unexpected key is always round the corner. Bach’s marking for the A minor slow movement—Largo con sordini, mesto (i. Muted strings initiate a lament whose broken, sobbing phrases, replete with falling semitones, and disquieting dynamic contrasts are the epitome of Empfindsamkeit. Was C P E here remembering his father’s Three- Part Invention in F minor? After the initial ritornello, the movement develops into a grieving dialogue between the muted orchestra and the unmuted cello, playing largely in its piercing upper register. As so often in Bach’s most personal slow movements, music here becomes heightened speech—a reminder, too, that his own clavichord playing was famed for its impassioned, rhetorical style of delivery. Brooding introspection is then banished in the exuberant, jig- like finale. Yet this being Bach, joviality is tempered by an underlying edginess, whether in abrupt hiatuses, the conflict between the orchestra’s triplets and the cello’s duplet rhythms, or the soloist’s brusquely thwarted attempts at lyricism. By the end the cello has cut its losses and matched the orchestra at its own hyperactive game—a leitmotif in all the fast movements of these restlessly inventive concertos.
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