PBO Announces March Amsterdam Concert

Poster design for this Thursday’s Live from Amsterdam program (from the PBO Web page for this concert)

At the end of this past week, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale (PBO) announced the next concert in its Live from Amsterdam series. Once again Music Director Richard Egarr and his wife, Alexandra Nepomnyashchaya, will perform keyboard music at the Schuilkerk De Hoop in Amsterdam. The title of the program will be J.C. Bach: Mozart’s Real Musical Father….

We all know the stories of how Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s father Leopold encouraged his son to pursue both keyboard performance and composition at a very early age. However, a somewhat more mature Mozart would knowledge that his “true musical father” was Johann Christian Bach, the eighteenth child of Johann Sebastian and the youngest of his eleven sons. By way of comparison, although neither of them studied with him, both Joseph Haydn and his not-particularly-receptive pupil Ludwig van Beethoven both acknowledge the influence of Sebastian’s second surviving son, Carl Philipp Emanuel. Neither of them studied with Emanuel; but they both enthusiastically endorsed his treatise Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (an essay on the true art of playing keyboard instruments).

Egarr and Nepomnyashchaya have prepared a program of duo performances of two “pairings” of sonatas by Christian Bach and Mozart. The first of these will couple the fifth of the keyboard duets published as Bach’s Opus 18, in the key of A major, with Mozart’s K. 381 four-hand sonata in D major. This will be followed by the sixth of the duets in Bach’s Opus 18, in the key of F major, paired with Mozart’s K. 358 four-hand sonata in B-flat major. (In other words there will be a “sharps pair” and a “flats pair.”) All the selections will be played on a fortepiano.

This program will be “live” streamed at 11 a.m. on Thursday, March 18. YouTube has already created the Web page for viewing, and the performance will be free of charge. A separate Web page has been created to provide program details.