Alexei Lubimov CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH Tangere

Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov has long been both a champion of contemporary composition and a dedicated interpreter of Baroque music with a passion for period instruments. In playing older music, he has argued, the further one gets from the modern piano, the more discoveries there are to be made. We find, Lubimov says, unexplored characteristics in the music of the master composers – “new colours, vitality and unpredictability.”

In his remarkable performance of music by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach here, Lubimov responds to the inventiveness of the composer’s fantasies, sonatas and rondos by making full creative use of the sonorities of the tangent piano. Briefly popular in the early 18th century, the tangent piano (whose strings are struck from beneath by wood or metal “tangents” and allowed to vibrate) offered, he determined, greater expressiveness and intensity than the harpsichord. Lubimov views it as an instrument well-matched to the changing temperament of C.P.E. Bach’s music, with its “rhetorical diversity, its melancholy and humour, its paradoxical harmony effects and individual rhythms.” Alexei Lubimov performs the music on a copy of a 1794 tangent piano by Späth and Schmahl, famed keyboard makers of Regensburg. The replica, from the workshop of Belgian maker Chris Maene had, says Lubimov, “a big effect on me, irresistibly inviting me to renew my imagination and suggesting at once the relevant music … C.P.E. Bach’s music affords extraordinarily generous scope for experimenting with sound design. One can dress it in completely different instrumental colours.”

Alexei Lubimov’s earlier recital disc Der Bote (recorded in 2000) included the composer’s Fantasie für Klavier fis-Moll alongside Cage, Bartók, Debussy, Mansurian and Silvestrov and found the pianist marvelling that Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach’s music “appeared almost the most modern in the programme”. Its timelessness is evident again in the present recording. (ECM Records)