CPE Bach Keyboard Works – Esfahani

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach occupies one of the stranger positions in musical history — acknowledged by everyone, truly known by almost no one. His father’s shadow fell long and dark, and then Haydn and Mozart came along and swallowed whatever light remained. Yet the son taught himself to feel, and that feeling went straight into the keyboard.

These six pieces span more than four decades of C.P.E.‘s creative life, from the angular, unpredictable sonatas of 1744 to the late fantasias that seem to dissolve tonality from the inside out. The range is remarkable. So is the interpretive challenge.

Mahan Esfahani meets that challenge head-on — and mostly wins.

What strikes you first is the sheer physicality of his playing. The harpsichord here is not a polite instrument tastefully decorated with ornaments. It bites. The opening Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Wq. 52/4, arrives with real urgency, the first movement’s jagged leaps and sudden dynamic reversals landing with something close to violence — controlled violence, but still. C.P.E. was writing in the empfindsamer style, the “sensitive style,” that German aesthetic of exaggerated emotional contrast and sudden harmonic detours, and Esfahani understands that the whole point is to keep the listener perpetually off balance.

The 1744 sonatas reveal a composer already restless within the forms he inherited. The Sonata in E Major, Wq. 62/5, is particularly instructive — its slow movement wanders into harmonic territory that Schubert would have recognized, all those unexpected modulations that sidestep the expected cadence and find somewhere stranger to land. Esfahani doesn’t smooth these moments over. He leans into the discomfort, letting the harmony hang in the air a beat longer than comfortable.

There’s something almost theatrical about C.P.E.‘s rhetoric, and Esfahani plays it that way. The ornaments aren’t decorative filigree — they’re expressive gestures, little stabs of feeling. The Sonata in C Minor, Wq. 65/31, from 1757, has a first movement of remarkable concentration, tight and compressed, and Esfahani shapes it with a clarity that never tips into dryness.

The two 1758 pieces show the composer consolidating, refining — and then the late works blow everything open again.

The Fantasia in F-sharp Minor, Wq. 67, from 1787, is one of the genuinely strange objects in eighteenth-century music. Forty-three years after those early sonatas, C.P.E. is writing something that barely holds together tonally, that lurches and sighs and seems to question its own existence at every turn. Esfahani plays it as the existential document it is. His rubato here is genuinely free — not metrically approximate, but actually improvisatory in feeling, as though he’s discovering the piece while performing it. Which is exactly right, because C.P.E. almost certainly was.

The Rondo in D Minor, Wq. 61/4, closes the program — a brief, melancholy farewell, the refrain returning again and again with increasing weariness. Esfahani finds the quiet devastation in it.

Not everything is perfect. There are moments in the early sonatas where the articulation feels slightly over-emphatic, where the pointing of every phrase becomes its own kind of rhetoric. C.P.E. needs room to breathe, and occasionally Esfahani is just a touch insistent.

But these are minor reservations. What Esfahani has accomplished here is to make a persuasive case — through playing rather than argument — that this music matters. It does. It mattered to Haydn, to Mozart, to Beethoven, all of whom acknowledged the debt. Hearing it played with this much intelligence and conviction, you understand why.