Alexei Lubimov - C.P.E. Bach: Tangere (2017) [CD Rip]

Alexei Lubimov chose to play these works by CPE Bach on a tangent piano, a very rare keyboard instrument with an unusual sound. From the middle of the eighteenth century the tangent piano became popular because it could offer more a expressive and intense sound than the harpsichord, and thereby could respond to the changes in the Zeitgeist. It is no accident that all three of the great Viennese composers – Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – named the ‘Hamburg Bach’ (Carl Philip Emanuel Bach), as their model. As he grew into maturity, CPE’s interest in keyboard music increasingly came to hone in on three genres: the fantasy, the rondo and the sonata. The present album is devoted to all three, plus a few lesser pieces to which the composer gave the title solfeggi. Six of the major pieces proposed by Alexei Lubimov are taken from the great collections known as “für Kenner und Liebhaber”, for connoisseurs and amateurs written between 1779 and 1787. The smaller pieces are taken from other printed collections Keyboard pieces of various kinds and Musical miscellany, published 1765. The listener may thus compare styles of works written at the very end of the Baroque period, and others composed during a time when Haydn and Mozart were already stars. Lubimov plays a modern copy of a Späht und Schmahl tangent piano built between 1794.