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Carl Philip Emanuel Bach:
The five sonatas for flute and obbligato harpsichord, W. 83-85
Fenwick Smith, flute
Edwin Swanborn, harpsichord
Revere Records RVR-0941.
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![[Picture of disc cover]](Images/fancifulflute.jpg)
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As you might infer from the unusual presentation, this CD has never been available through the usual retail market, and so has never been reviewed, and remains virtually unknown among fans of C.P.E. Bach and the flute. Here's why: this project started out in the LP era, and nearly fell through the cracks with the advent of digital recording and the Compact Disc medium. After years of the sundry delays endemic to the recording industry, the company that had agreed to the project rejected it on the grounds that they were no longer issuing analog recordings. Since the playing time of 54'30" was also a bit short for the expensive new medium, and since I had never really been happy with the sound quality, I stuck the master tapes on a high shelf and forgot about them.
A few years later I heard that a high-school friend, Morris McClellan, had started a record company with a unique marketing scheme, which he dubbed "in-store play and sell." He provided gift shops, bookstores, cafes, etc. with respectable sound systems, and then kept them stocked with recordings ranging from new-age to pop to classical, for use as background music. The recordings were available for sale at the cash register, as an impulse purchase for anyone who happened to notice and like the music. I thought this less fastidious market might be suitable for my white-elephant C.P.E. Bach record--and Morris agreed. I submitted the master tapes to Sound/Mirror Studios of Jamaica Plain, MA, where Brad Michaels digitally remastered the original analog tapes. In doing so he performed a minor miracle: a couple of clumsy splices were now inaudible, and the sound was so greatly improved that even I liked it. I wrote liner notes, pitched to a more general readership than I usually write for, and eleven years after conception, the recording finally made its way into the world. It may be purchased directly from Revere Records at 1 800 228-8148.
Album Notes
In German, Bach means brook. More than one commentator has remarked that Johann Sebastian Bach's prodigious output might more logically have come from someone whose name meant "torrent" or "flood." He was notably fertile also in domestic life, begetting no fewer than twenty-one children by his two wives; four of them went on to become notable composers. Of these the most prominent was Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, the composer of our five flute sonatas. C.P.E. Bach, standing as he does in the long shadow of his father, suffers from the perception of being something less than the real thing. But his style is markedly different from J.S. Bach's, and these five sonatas are full of fresh and original invention. In fact, with the exception of his father, Emanuel may have made history's greatest contribution, in quantity and quality, to the repertoire of the flute. This was encouraged in part by his three decades in the service of Frederick the Great, an accomplished amateur flutist whose preferred diversion from the rigors of statecraft was the chamber-music evenings he held regularly at the royal palace in Berlin.
Frederick kept in his service some of the most notable performers of the day. Foremost among these was his mentor in all things related to the flute, Johann Joachim Quantz. Quantz was a fine flutist himself, a master flutemaker, and a composer of modest ability, conservative taste, and great energy--he supplied his patron with no fewer than 300 concertos. He was also the only musician in the royal entourage permitted to venture the occasional criticism of Frederick's musicianship.
C.P.E. Bach was engaged more for his skill as a keyboard player than for his compositional ability. He was privileged to accompany Frederick the Great in his very first flute solo at the new palace in Charlottenburg, an honor proudly recalled by Bach in his memoirs. But the compositional style displayed in his many keyboard and orchestral works was unwelcome at the royal court. Bach's preferred style is passionate, dramatic, and unpredictable; he was fond of startling dynamic changes and daring modulations to remote keys. Such radical modernism was anathema to the conservative tastes of the King, who sought comfort and diversion in music rather than shock and stimulation. Being a professional, Bach sought to compromise his style to please his royal patron, but the far greater output of Quantz, not to mention the far higher salary he enjoyed, testify to the King's preference for the older composer's dependable competence.
If, in these pieces, Bach intentionally restrained his compositional style to curry favor with Frederick, his irrepressible originality nonetheless shines through. The opening theme of the D-major sonata, for instance, presented first by the harpsichord (!), then by the flute, is more wide-ranging and long-breathed, and more floridly developed than anything we will encounter in Quantz, and by its very expansiveness it announces a serious and ambitious movement. In all the sonatas Bach, a supreme virtuoso himself, makes technical demands on the flute that would have sorely tried the King's modest ability--especially in the finales, with their rapid-fire dialogue between flute and keyboard. The slow movement of the E-major sonata plumbs emotional depths that would have ruffled the decorum of Frederick's musical soirées at Sans-Souci; and the finale of the same sonata shows Bach at his most quirkily original: after a high-spirited romp, with flute and harpsichord chasing one another around a host of harmonic obstacles and rhythmic pitfalls, the movement simply evaporates with a sigh. If such virtuosity and exuberant invention must have proved vexatious to Frederick the Great, for the modern music lover they provide varied, witty, and entertaining listening.
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