C.P.E. Bach 300 years / Fantasia & 6 Organ Sonatas

In his day, C.P.E. Bach was often characterised as being an ‘original genius’. His compositions bear striking witness to this fertile originality. For a longtime C.P.E. Bach was viewed as the most renowned Sturm und Drang composer. However the free fantasy, so fabulously represented by C.P.E. Bach, is a phenomenon whose roots date back at least a century earlier. Likewise, the music’s improvisatory character, firmly grounded in a formidable improvisatory ability and C.P.E. Bach’s exceptionally unique harmonic insight, was already a prominent feature in music written long before the Sturm und Drang period, that of Johann Jakob Froberger and the composers who employed the Stylus Phantasticus (Dieterich Buxtehude, Nicolaus Bruhns and the young Johann Sebastian Bach). Rather than attempting to categorise C.P.E. Bach as belonging to a particular stylistic period, it is far better to view him as a highly individual and original composer. His keyboard music forms a unique oeuvre, without any equivalent in his day (incidentally, the word keyboard is used here to refer to clavichord, fortepiano and harpsichord!). Freedom permeates this music, along with unexpected harmonic modulations, rhetoric, virtuosity, special effects, precisely notated articulations, every dynamic gradation, unlimited variety, abrupt stops and tempo changes.