CPE Bach: D Minor Prelude, Variations & Fugue | Beethoven Piano Sonatas Op. 110 & 111 | Classical Music for Study, Relaxation & Concert Performance

The history of music is a story of change. At some points it is definitive: as when Peri and the Camerata of Bardi literally birth-dated the Baroque Period in 1600 with Peri's Euridice. However, when it comes to dating the birth of the Classical Era, all we can do is pin history to the death of one composer and be content that it happens to be a round number. The living and vital sub-currents that swirl about the death of J.S. Bach in 1750 make this date, as the beginning of the Classical Period, a historical convenience at best. The life and career of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach is a case in point. C.P.E. Bach and his brothers were already on a completely new trajectory well before the death of their father. Imbued with the new aesthetics of sturm und drang, they forged new ground that, long after their fathers death, bore the mature Classicism of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. C.P.E. Bach was the champion of the new empfindsamer stil the style of feeling. He composed in a new, fragmentary, highly contrasted language that smote the prevailing Doctrine of Affects and any affinity to his father's legacy asunder. Not only was there more than one affekt per movement, but the new expression, as manifest in Bach s new vocal approach to the keyboard, was intense, personal, declamatory and subjective. Bach's influence on the First Viennese School is well documented. Haydn poured over his works finding inspiration for his early sonatas. Beethoven's first teacher, Christian Gottlob Neefe, was a north German adherent and well versed in Bach's works. In turn, there are accounts of Beethoven, now the teacher, using Bach's Essay and other works as material in the instruction of luminaries such as Carl Czerny and even the Archduke Rudolph. But connecting Beethoven with Bach, soul-to-soul, is more of an act of intuition. It is generally observed that a subliminal affinity is present in the line from Bach through Haydn and finally Beethoven that is fundamentally different than the line that runs from Johann Christian Bach through Mozart. The former is often characterized by terse, angular ideas and disruptive phraseology whereas the latter is more poised, melodic and possessed with a certain classical equilibrium. It is in this difference we sense that Beethoven's musical DNA is in the phylum of Bach and Haydn, not Mozart. In the present recording, I expose this common DNA by juxtaposition. The works chosen reflect those elements that by their nature, exhibit an affinity: bar-less recitative, a certain speaking quality, high contrast motivically/ rhythmically/ dynamically, plangent adagios, skeletal keyboard textures and a sense of freedom driven by a kind of mysticism. Cameron Robert Watson brings to the piano a broad view of music, refusing to limit his range of experiences to piano. In addition to teaching, examining, adjudication and performance throughout Canada, he has recorded numerous solo programs for CBC; written music for theatre, film and dance; and performed both as pianist and narrator in interdisciplinary projects combining dance, visual art and poetry. Watson's key teachers include Boris Roubakine, Leonard Isaacs, William Aide, Jane Coop and the eminent Gyorgy Sebok as well as composers Luigi Zanninnelli and Gerhardt Wuensch. After studying filmmaking at New York University, he translated his lifelong love of dance and music into a documentary entitled Dancessence produced by ACCESS Television. In addition to these activities, Watson is a legal scholar, possessing an LLB from the University of Alberta, and was the winner of the 2000 Gordon F. Henderson/ SOCAN Copyright Award for his work on music copyright.