Bach, J.C.: 6 Sonatas for Keyboard With Flute Accompaniment , Op. 16

Album review

J.C. Bach's six Sonatas, Op. 16, are so representative of the chamber music of the age, not to mention that they are extremely pleasant and charming, that it makes perfect sense to perform them on period instruments. For this recording, Miklós Spányi is playing a tangent piano and Benedek Csalog a Baroque flute. The tangent piano falls somewhere between a clavichord and a fortepiano, technologically speaking. This means it has expressive capabilities, but not necessarily volume, which is a disappointment here. The tones of the piano do blend very well with the flute, much better than they would with a violin, which is the alternate instrument indicated in Bach's score. However, in an endeavor to preserve the natural sound of the instruments in this recording, the piano's volume never exceeds that of the flute, making it hard to hear those differences in loud and soft that distinguish it from a harpsichord. In the second movements of the Sonatas No. 1 and No. 6, stops are engaged that noticeably alter the sound of the piano. In the first instance, the sound is "softened," as a modern soft pedal would do, and in the second, the stop lifts the dampers similarly to the way the modern sostenuto pedal works and the sound is like a musicbox. Other than these, Spányi's changes in expression are not that obvious and the resulting impression is that he isn't a very sensitive performer. Granted, these sonatas are very much in the Style Galant, so there aren't great emotional highs and lows in them, but even so, Bach's melodies need crescendos and decrescendos for shaping. This is a historically very well informed performance and it is satisfying to some degree. However, while not necessarily advocating for artificial enhancement of a recording's sound, it could be argued in this case that being authentic doesn't always make the most of the music.
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