Orazia Sciortino, Matteo Costa (soundengineer)

Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto, Orazio Sciortino

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and the piano concerto - a lifelong relationship, challenging and exhausting, but altogether fruitful, brilliant and even spectacular. As a 19-year-old (under his father's eyes, as it were), he wrote his first piano concerto in Leipzig; at the age of 74, he completed his last of the genre in Hamburg, the year of his death. Between them lies a treasury of fifty piano concertos, colossal and unfathomable. It is a wonder that this unusually rich and stylistically influential genre of the composer is only now coming to light. Of all genres of composition, C. P. E. Bach's piano concertos have kept their secret the longest as unpublished music - that is, the very genre of works that can be considered the most personal and progressive of his compositional output. In his own words, "Since I had to create most of my works for specific individuals and for the public, I have always been more compelled in it than in the few pieces I prepared only for myself. Among all my works, especially for keyboard instruments, there are only a few...concertos that I composed in complete freedom and for my own use."

• Bach, C P E: Fantasia for keyboard in C major, Wq. 61/6 (H291)
• Bach, C P E: Harpsichord Sonatina in D major, Wq. 96 (H449)
• Bach, C P E: Keyboard Concerto in D major, Wq. 43/2 (H472)
• Bach, C P E: Keyboard Concerto in E, Wq. 14 (H417)
• Bach, C P E: La Gleim, Wq. 117/19 (H89)