As a German composer whose early works exemplified the grandeur of Baroque style and whose subsequent works evolved into pure Classicism, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s keyboard music offers a charming and historical look into the musical transition between two great eras of music history. Standing in the shadow of his famous father, Johann Sebastian Bach, C.P.E. Bach is sometimes overlooked by historians for his ground-breaking keyboard Sonatas and his significant contribution to Protestant Church music in the second half of the Eighteenth Century.

…While C.P.E. Bach’s progressive and uniquely individual style was most pronounced in his keyboard Sonatas and certain Symphonies, his Concertos for various instruments also contain many features that seize the attention of the listener with their great originality. After leaving the employ of King Frederick the Great of Prussia and settling in Hamburg, Bach was no longer restricted by the conservative tastes of the royal court, and he was able to indulge in a more daring, experimental kind of music. J.F. Reichardt, one of the most important music critics of the Eighteenth Century, praised the “original and audacious progression of ideas and the great variety and novelty in the forms and modulations” of Bach’s Symphonies. – via early-music.com

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