Miklos Spanyi

Miklós Spányi – C.P.E. Bach: The Solo Keyboard Music, Vol. 39 (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:20:21 minutes | 1,59 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

On this amply filled album, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Clavierstücke verschiedener Art (“Keyboard Pieces of various Kinds”) is presented in its entirety, with the exception of three songs for voice and keyboard. This collection is the most diverse of Bach’s publications and includes multi-movement genres, a free fantasia, a learned fugue, and various short pieces of varying degrees of difficulty. The variety suggests that Bach did not want for his keyboard music to be strictly divided into ‘light’ and ‘serious’ pieces. But he also wished to demonstrate a wide range of techniques of keyboard composition and performance: orchestral writing in the symphony and the concerto, two-part textures in the sonata, polyphony in the fugue, and free and virtuosic composition in the fantasias and solfeggios.

(more…)

Miklos Spanyi – C.P.E. Bach: The Solo Keyboard Music, Vol. 37 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:53 minutes | 1,56 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Described in Gramophone as ‘one of the most needed and important recording projects in progress today’, this series has up until now featured the clavichord (on 27 discs), the tangent piano (7 discs) and the fortepiano (2 discs). It is therefore something of an occasion when Miklós Spányi for his Volume 37 chooses to perform on a harpsichord. In doing so he reminds us of C.P.E. Bach’s own advice to keyboard players to have both a clavichord and a harpsichord in order to play ‘all sorts of things alternating’ (‘allerley Sachen abwechselnd’). But the disc – which includes some of the composer’s earliest works – also features one of the very few, if not the only, compositions that Bach specifically dedicated to the harpsichord, namely the Sonata per il cembalo a 2 tastature. In it, Bach makes colourful use of the instrument by specifying various detailed and idiosyncratic harpsichord registrations. Spányi also performs two of the few fugues – in F and A major respectively – that Carl Philipp composed: besides the general shift in fashion away from intricate counterpoint to melodic simplicity, it is possible that he found father Johann Sebastian’s achievements in that particular genre too hard an act to follow…

(more…)

Miklós Spányi – C.P.E. Bach: The Solo Keyboard Music, Vol. 36 (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:20:00 minutes | 1,36 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach published the first collection in his series ‘for Connaisseurs and Amateurs’ in 1779, at the age of 65, and the sixth and final in 1787, a year before his death. Throughout the series he continues to develop the three genres which are featured in it – sonata, rondo and fantasia.

In the sixth collection, the fantasias and rondos continue to resemble each other in structure and in stylistic features: abrupt tempo changes, disruptive rhythms, and constant harmonic non sequiturs. Bach gives them ample dimensions, but as in previous collections he continues to reduce the length of the sonatas, to the point that Sonata No. 1 is the shortest work of the collection, although it is in three distinct movements. On this amply-filled album, Miklós Spányi also includes four other works from Carl Philipp’s last decade which in various ways underline the composer’s boundless curiosity.

The Sonata in G major, Wq 65/48 was composed for an experimental keyboard instrument with a bowing device coupled to it – a ‘Bogenclavier’ – while Bach in the set of variations Wq 118/9 gives us his own take on La Folia, the harmonic scheme that almost a century earlier had inspired composers such as Corelli, Marin Marais and Vivaldi, as well as his own father, in the famous ‘Peasant Cantata’.

(more…)

Miklós Spányi – C.P.E. Bach: Solo Keyboard Music, Vol. 40 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:21:50 minutes | 1,65 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

This recording features solo keyboard arrangements of works by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach originally scored for other instruments. In the second half of the eighteenth century the demand for keyboard music increased rapidly, as musical skills became a social requisite for young ladies of the upper classes. To provide compositions for these new keyboard players was financially profitable, but Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach also had another reason for welcoming arrangements: the keyboard instruments were his favourite medium, and he devoted himself to making them into solo instruments as important as the violin and other melody instruments.

(more…)

Miklos Spanyi – C.P.E. Bach: Solo Keyboard Music, Vol. 38 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:35 minutes | 1,58 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach was more systematic than many of his composer colleagues when it came to keeping track of his own works and made at least two catalogues of his compositions for solo keyboard. At various times he also destroyed manuscripts that remained in his possession, especially those of early works. But even so, there are a number of pieces that slipped through the net, and several of them can be found on this album. A few of them were included anonymously into the second Clavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach, while Emanuel Bach was still living in his fathers home in Leipzig. Among the pieces are some that have been identified as being by Bach only recently, during the ongoing work of producing a printed edition of the composers complete works. As devised by Miklos Spányi, the programme is a colourful mix of brief dance movements and other miniatures, provides both variety and insights into the formative years of the composer. It ends with Bachs Variations on a Menuet by Locatelli, the most technically demanding of his variation sets composed in 1735 when he was a young man of 21.

(more…)

Miklos Spanyi – C.P.E. Bach: The Solo Keyboard Music, Vol. 35 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:18:32 minutes | 1,37 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

As Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach published successive collections of the Kenner und Liebhaber series, he explored new genres and styles. In the second collection he added his idiosyncratic rondos, and in the fourth he included free fantasias. The fifth collection, composed between 1779 and 1784, contains no new genres, but displays more variety in terms of textures and thematic ideas than any of the previous volumes. In fact, Bach’s preoccupation with variation is almost obsessive – it is as if he cannot finish phrases without varying either texture, tonality, rhythmic pulse or dynamics.

(more…)