Michael Rische’s CPE Bach Project: Volume 7

from the Amazon.com Web page for this album

Once again, it has taken hänssler CLASSIC over two years to release another album of piano concertos composed by Carl Philipp Emanuel (CPE) Bach. The sixth volume appeared in the middle of April of 2020. The Amazon.com Web page for the seventh volume was created at the beginning of last month. To the best of my knowledge, as of this writing, the album is only available for MP3 download. Fortunately, that download Web page includes the booklet along with the album’s nine tracks.

The pianist is again Michael Rische. He is accompanied by the Berliner Barock Solisten, which he conducts from the keyboard; and, like all previous albums, the new release consists of three concertos. These are presented in order of their Wq numbers: number 5 in C minor, number 8 in A major, and number 30 in B minor. Unfortunately, the booklet notes written by Rische do not provide a particularly informative account of when and where each of these concertos was composed and performed for the first time.

The good news is that these three concertos are likely to have been significant inspirations for the next generation of composers, including Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Indeed, there is a provocative eccentricity in the opening gesture of Wq 5; and it takes a bit of time to establish that the key of the concerto really is in C minor. Rische’s notes even suggest that Wq 30 influenced the daring rhetoric that we encounter in Mozart’s K. 466 piano concerto in D minor.

With the release of this new album, Rische now accounts for 21 of Bach’s 52 piano concertos. Presumably, COVID has at least some impact on slowing down his productivity in recording the full canon of concertos; but, given that a similar amount of time elapsed between the fifth and sixth volumes, I am not expecting the “productivity rate” to accelerate! All I can do is enjoy each new album as it is released, and there is more than enough imaginative content in this seventh volume to keep my listening skills occupied.