C.P.E. Bach / Rische/ Berliner Barock Solisten - Piano Concertos

Michael Rische writes: "After recording 18 piano concertos, the artist is entitled to draw up a preliminary summary. Bach said that he wrote this series of works for himself. He confessed to the exploiting of all the freedoms he needed. Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven recognized this and admired it. It is anything but inevitable that this formidable series of works is now at last reaching us. The question of why is, however, less the focus of my work than the claim to be giving this wealth of music a voice in our own age. The certainty, indeed the self-assurance, with which we musicians of today perform the masterpieces of bygone ages is, however, anything but a foregone conclusion. The interpreter, who possesses only the aural sensibilities of his age, catches the spark of the music during performance, and the performed work responds with it's intellectual depth. The artist and the work are brought together, entirely regardless of the chronological distance between the two. This is how masterpieces live among us. They came into being because the creative spirit laid down standards that are not limited to it's own era. Our admiration for the visionary power and instinctive rigour of it's formulation is not without justification." The musician of our time has in his mind, consciously or not, the musical thinking of Debussy and Ravel, of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, and of Messiaen and Ligeti - a large radius of musical experience that reaches into the present day and suddenly reverberates in a piano concerto by Bach. The constant refining of our ears, for which we thank the great composers, finally allows us to do justice to the piano concertos of Emanuel Bach; something that was denied them in a previous age.