The music on this disc dates from the 1780s, late in C.P.E. Bach's career, when he was the music director for the city of Hamburg. While Mozart was wrangling with archbishops and nobles, and soaking up the revolutionary winds blowing from France, these pieces were written for the most old-fashioned kind of event imaginable -- ceremonies marking the inductions of prominent individuals to the Lutheran ministry. The odd but rather deep liner notes (you know you're dealing with a German recording when you pick up the notes and ...
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The music on this disc dates from the 1780s, late in C.P.E. Bach's career, when he was the music director for the city of Hamburg. While Mozart was wrangling with archbishops and nobles, and soaking up the revolutionary winds blowing from France, these pieces were written for the most old-fashioned kind of event imaginable -- ceremonies marking the inductions of prominent individuals to the Lutheran ministry. The odd but rather deep liner notes (you know you're dealing with a German recording when you pick up the notes and read something like "Nevertheless, the contradiction between subjective and objective consideration remains") provide a good deal of the works' reception history, and one learns that a generation after they were written, they were already being condemned as insignificant relics of an older way of doing things. Many listeners will reach the same conclusion; Bach's festival cantatas are uneasy mixtures of chorales and operatic arias, with rather pompous passages of trumpets and drums...
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