Keyboard Concerto in A minor, Wq. 26 (H430)
Keyboard Concerto in C major, Wq. 20 (H423)
Keyboard Concerto in G major, Wq. 44 (H477)

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and the piano concerto – a relationship to last a whole life long: demanding and grueling, fruitful throughout, yet glamorous to spectacular at the same time. He wrote his first piano concerto while still an eighteen-year-old student at St. Thomas School in Leipzig, and finished his last specimen of the genre in Hamburg in the year of his death at the age of 74. Between there lies a wealth of fifty piano concertos, colossal and incommensurable. While the truths of faith determined the coordinates of Johann Sebastian Bach’s thought, his son Emanuel is a composer of the “Enlightenment”, in which the subject determinesitself through reason. His friendship with Lessing and Diderot speaks for itself, and when Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” was published in 1781, Bach was one of the first subscribers. The unmistakable new rhetoric of the piano style, which makes a surprisingly contemporary impression on us today, is already fully formulated in the “Prussian Sonatas” for piano solo; only in the piano concertos, however, does it become a great form. Despite all admiration for the later and deservedly popular “Hamburg Symphonies”, this great form is consummate in the piano concertos. This refers not only to cleverly teasing the expectations of listeners, but also to the branching motivic links, the sense of the great in the small – with all long-term consequences for the dialog between soloist and orchestra. Bach unfolds the new style by setting in the place of a general counterpoint the rhythmic cell, the dominant motif, which is astoundingly capable of adapting and changing both of them. (Michael Rische)