Abel:
Quartet in B flat major op. 8 No. 2 WKO 62
Quartet in G major WKO 227
Adagio from Sonata No. 24 in D minor for viola da gamba solo WKO 209
Allegro from Sonata No. 22 in D minor for viola da gamba solo WKO 207

Bach JC:
Quartet No. 1 in B flat major Warb B60 from “Six Quatuors concertant …” (1776)
Quintet in F major op. 11 No. 3 Warb B73 – Sextet in C major B78

The extremely critical Leopold Mozart had already valued highly the light flowing style in the chamber music of Johann Christian Bach (1735-1782), the youngest Bach son, and noted quite rightly that such works show “all the characteristics of a good composition”, they are “natural, flowing, lightly written and carefully composed”. Such music would be “more difficult to compose than all those harmonic progressions which most people cannot understand and pleasing melodies which are difficult to perform”. This may also be noticed in the chamber music of Carl Friedrich Abel (1723-1787), whose works were even regarded as a yardstick for good music by his contemporaries. In the 1780s the writer Christoph Friedrich Nicolai spoke of adagios which had been composed “in the singing and beautiful style of Abel”. Both composers are today considered to be important precursors of Viennese classicism. Above all, they are significant and style-setting contemporaries in an age, which attributed to elegance and grace the same value as only the connoisseur gives to the art of counterpoint.