Music from previous centuries can also sound surprising and new. That’s the message I took from Marc-André Hamelin’s astonishing album of twenty works—many of them multi-movement sonatas—by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the second son of Johann Sebastian Bach and renowned, even today, as an influential innovator. Hardly a few measures go by without some angular shift in the melodic line or unpredictable change of harmony.
A number of the pieces here—including one of my favorites, the Fantasia in C Major—are from the six collections of keyboard works 'for connoisseurs and amateurs' that C P E published in 1779-87. Some could be easily played by intermediate-level pianists. But Hamelin, a musician of superlative gifts, makes us feel as if the composer has returned to Earth, discovered the glories of the modern piano, and is improvising the music in front of us. This impression holds not just for the fantasias (a genre whose very name evokes a spirit of playful imaginativeness and formal freedom) but also for the sonatas and rondos. I feel I understand, even more than before, why Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all admired this astonishingly creative figure.