After nearly 30 years at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach took up the position of cantor and music director in Hamburg, left vacant by the death of his godfather Georg Philipp Telemann. Even though his new duties included teaching as well as providing music for the five city churches of Hamburg, Bach nevertheless still found the time to compose keyboard sonatas and keyboard concertos as well as to present secular concerts. Two of the works on this disc, the Concertos in F major and in E flat major, were composed soon after the move to Hamburg. While the third work, the Concerto in C minor, had been composed some 20 years earlier, Bach once described it as ‘one of my showpieces’, implying that he performed it regularly, most likely also in Hamburg. If Bach in Hamburg had to adapt to new demands on his time, he also encountered an unfamiliar musical community, which in comparison to that of Berlin was slightly old-fashioned, with its own strong traditions, including a particular love for the harpsichord. Bach must have seen this as a challenge: records show that many of his public performances were on the harpsichord but he is also mentioned as playing the modish fortepiano. In an interesting essay in the booklet to this disc, Miklós Spányi discusses this background, explaining his reasons for performing two of the works on the tangent piano, and the third on the harpsichord. The previous instalment of Spányi’s highly regarded series received top marks (‘10/10/10’) on the website klassik-heute.com, while Classic FM Magazine described the performances by Spányi and the Finnish period ensemble Opus X as ‘bubbling with life in BIS’s crisp recorded sound.’
