Sonatas for Flute & Continuo

The emotion awakens In contrast to Johann Sebastian Bach, who has been acclaimed as one of the greatest composers of all time, Bach’s second son Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach remains undervalued. Yet he, too, left great musical assets on this planet. The first time I came across Carl Philipp’s compositions did not, in fact, occur during my study of early music: two of Carl Philipp’s compositions, the sonata in a minor for solo flute Wq 132 and the flute concerto in d minor Wq22 , are part of the standard repertoire for final exams and competitions for students of the Boehm flute, the contemporary instrument with which I began my career. Still, it wasn’t until I started studying the flauto traverso, in other words, when I entered the world of early music, that I encountered the “jewels” that I recorded here. Belgium has been a hotspot for early music since the beginning of the movement in the 1970s. The country has produced many pioneers and Brussels has become one of the central locations of the early music scene. By a stroke of luck, a number of manuscripts by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach happen to be kept in the collection of the music library of the Royal Conservatory in Brussels. Their presence there led me to pay more attention to these scores, and eventually ended up changing my views on baroque music. Even if his music contains so many treasures, why should we turn yet again to Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach if several recordings are already available on the market? On this recording, I approached Carl Philipp as a pre-Romantic composer, as opposed to just one of baroque ones. At the time of the so-called “classical” period, every single composer sought to find his or her own language and aimed to generate “storms.” But in fact, not everyone was Mozart. Considering the Empfindsamer Stil as the transitional bridge toward the Romantic era, rather than just one of the compositional styles of the late baroque, enables us to capture Carl Philipp’s music more clearly. The origin of Romanticism derives from the aim to evaluate one’s instincts and personal emotions, rather than to examine authentic facts. Of course, understanding the rhetoric and ornamentation of Carl Philipp’s works remains important, but I strongly believe that grasping the mission statement of the composer should take a more crucial role in the process of recreating his music. Robert Schuman wrote about Carl Phillip that “as a creative musician he remained very far behind his father.” I hope the revolutionary qualities of his compositions will prove Schumann wrong. May the emotion be with you. Toshiyuki Shibata Brussels, 2019