Michael Rische & Berlin Baroque Soloists - C.P.E. Bach: Piano Concertos, Vol. 5 (2018)

What happened in Leipzig in 1733 was crucial to the development of a musical genre that has been an integral part of the music scene for over two hundred years: the keyboard concerto. That year, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his great Concerto in D minor BWV 1052 and his second oldest son Carl Philipp Emanuel, aged just 19, composed his first keyboard concerto, the Concerto Wq 1 in A minor. Anyone who directly compares the two concertos will hardly believe that they were both written in the same place and at the same time: on the one hand, the elder Bachs harpsichord piece, which plumbs the deepest depths of polyphony; on the other, the younger Bachs new approach to keyboard-writing, a style that almost seems to overlook the omnipresent tradition of counterpoint. Setting aside the extremely complicated compositional history of JS Bachs harpsichord concerto from the presumed adaptation of an oboe concerto by Benedetto Marcello through to the arrangement of Bachs own violin concerto for keyboard by his son Emanuel (BWV 1052a) what is certain is that the younger Bach did not simply inherit the keyboard concerto as a genre from the hands of his father; he played a decisive part in shaping and enriching it from the outset. Another point to note is that the composers artistic identity fundamentally changed during this period: the truths of faith ceased to be the focal point, eclipsed by principles of the Enlightenment, namely self-assurance and self-reliance.