The last time I saw Michael Tilson Thomas he challenged me to a game of Name the Composer. On the upright piano in his hotel suite he played a score in neutral gear, expressionless to a fault. I identified the music as early classical, German not Italian, school of Bach, maybe a son or a pupil. Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, I guessed.
Close, said Michael.
It was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the most prolific of the sons. Emanuel, as Michael knew, was the son who pushed music as fast as he dared to the very edge of the Romantic era. In Berlin, where he served Frederick the Great for 30 years, his symphonies were sniffed at by older musicians for being “hyper-expressive”, but that’s a very partial judgement.
The six symphonies performed here stand out for a lack of Italian decoration along with a va-va-voom propulsion that looks ahead to Joseph Haydn, future maker of the four-part symphony. All of Emanuel’s symphonies are in three movements, mostly in major keys. In his mid-40s, eager to be taken seriously, he embraces solemnity as his trademark, almost to the point of morbidity.
That said, these performances by the Poland-based period ensemble Arte dei Suonatori, veer back to Italian smiles, with more than a trace of frivolity. I am not sure they would have pleased Emanuel Bach. The allegros in the E-flat major and G major symphonies are definitely danceable, although not in the least bit erotic. They are a marker for two centuries of German symphonic dominance.
The Suonatori are led from the harpsichord by Marcin Świątkiewicz. This may be another marker. The heartland of historically informed performance now lies well to the right of Berlin, in the north and east of old Europe.
