Album review: The Solo Keyboard Music

Published on Friday 19 June 2009 16:56

BACH The Solo Keyboard Music * * * * BIS CD 1492, £12.72

The tangent piano was a period instrument soon overtaken by the hammer piano, its delicate tones perhaps too ethereal for major concert halls, though excellent in the context of a drawing room. Here, Hungarian pianist Mikls Spnyi performs a range of works by Bach on the instrument: not that the works were necessarily composed for it, but simply to demonstrate the difference in tonal qualities.

With royal and courtly patronage drying up with the close of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Bach found a new income from the middle-class amateurs who purchased his published music. Did his compositional style change to meet the demands of his audience? Whatever, these sonatas, dances and romances certainly have a winning quality to them.