C.P.E. Bach: The Solo Keyboard Music Vol. 41

This album contains solo piano arrangements of works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach that were originally composed for other instruments. In the second half of the 18th century, the demand for piano music grew rapidly as musical knowledge increasingly became part of the education for young ladies of the upper classes. Providing compositions for these new keyboard instruments was financially lucrative, but Bach also had another reason for making arrangements: Keyboard instruments were his preferred medium. The seven short pieces on this well-filled CD all exist in versions for various small instrument groups or, in some cases, for mechanical instruments. In his commentaries, Spányi suggests that these may in fact be the original versions, perhaps written down in keyboard notation as drafts for further versions and later arranged by Bach for various ensembles. Miklós Spányi has grouped these short pieces around four large-scale works, two of which are arrangements of symphonies that were probably not arranged by or for the composer himself. The solo piano arrangements of the two concertos, which were made by Bach himself and are easier to play than the original concertos, were intended for amateurs. On this CD, Spányi uses an extremely versatile and colorful tangent grand piano, an instrument very popular in the second half of the 18th century. This particular instrument was built in 1998 from a model dating from 1799.