Keyboard Sonatas

The pianist Danny Driver has garnered the highest possible praise for his two York Bowen discs on Hyperion. Now, demonstrating his extraordinary versatility, he turns to a composer from a very different age yet one who has been similarly overlooked by the musical establishment. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, second son of Johann Sebastian, was both revered and criticized by his contemporaries for his bold departures from conventional modes of musical expression. He perfected a highly original and intensely personal compositional style known as the empfindsamer Stil (literally, the sensitive style ). C.P.E. Bach s dramatic music clearly breaks away from, yet also builds upon, the early eighteenth-century style perfected by his father. His compositions mark one of the first and among the most inspired repudiations of the baroque aesthetic, in which a single unified mood dominates each movement. C.P.E. Bach composed more than three hundred keyboard works during his lifetime. All of the works on this recording were composed during the 1740s, while he was in the service of King Frederick II of Prussia.