Benda: 6 Sonatas and 6 Sonatinas for Fortepiano

Album review

Jiri Antonin Benda, a Bohemian-born court musician to Frederick the Great of Prussia, likely became friends with Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach after his father J.S. Bach's celebrated visit to Frederick at Potsdam in 1747. It is C.P.E. Bach, rather than the elder Bach, who is the primary influence on the short keyboard sonatas and sonatinas recorded here. This is music of the so-called empfindsamer Stil or sensitive style that flourished in Germany and left its mark even on Haydn and Mozart in faraway Vienna. Three of the six sonatas and four of the single-movement sonatinas are in minor keys. Benda typically begins his fast movement with a rapid, irregular phrase that may contain a pregnant pause or two. Like C.P.E. Bach he favors sudden, unprepared harmonic transitions, and if he doesn't quite come up with the shockers that occur in C.P.E.' s keyboard music, he is that better-known composer's equal in terms of generating the material of a movement from the motivic content of its opening material. It is easy to imagine the brash young Beethoven in Bonn picking through these pieces, which were published in 1757. Fortepianist Jacques Ogg plays a replica of a very early fortepiano, one of the Silbermann instruments that the elder Bach was shown on his 1747 visit. It has a very tinny sound in the quiet slow movements but has ample dynamic range for Benda's sudden contrasts of loud and quiet -- and Ogg does a good job of pushing the instrument to its limits in this genuinely dramatic music. The fortepiano's strengths come through in the nervous ornaments that are another stylistic hallmark of these works, and Ogg executes these briskly. Not a likely bestseller, this disc nevertheless has lots to offer those interested in the various subgenres of Classical-era music. Libraries should have this, for Jiri Benda's music is less often recorded even than that of his brother Frantisek.
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