| 2 CD |
€ 19.95
|
Preorder |
| Label Evil Penguin |
UPC 0608917725322 |
Catalogue number EPRC 0066 |
Release date 25 October 2024 |
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Sonatas with Varied Reprises (comp. 1758–9, publ. 1760) constituted a bold experiment. Spelling out every repeat, Bach applies to each the art of variation. Starting off as a service (“play this and you’ll sound as if you’re improvising”), the opus ends up a masterclass in variation. Tom Beghin, playing his own beloved clavichord, enacts the role of the keyboardist- composer who repeats himself, while never saying the same thing twice.
Tom Beghin combines a career as performer with that of researcher and teacher. His published work spans different media, from commercially released CDs and films to academic essays and books. His work on Beethoven's 1803 Erard piano resulted in the book Beethoven's French Piano: A Tale of Ambition and Frustration (Chicago, 2022, winner of the American Musical Instrument Society's 2024 Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize) and a double CD (Evil Penguin Records, 2020, winner of the 2020 Caecilia Prize from the Belgian Music Press). The year 2017 saw the birth of Inside the Hearing Machine, an amalgam of publications on Beethoven's late piano sonatas and deafness. His monograph The Virtual Haydn: Paradox of a Twenty-First-Century Keyboardist (Chicago, 2015) followed his recording of the complete solo Haydn keyboard works (Naxos 2009/2011, nominated for a Juno Award by The Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences). He also co-edited Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric (Chicago, 2007, winner of the 2009 American Musicological Society's Ruth Solie Award).
Alumnus of the HIP-doctoral program at Cornell University, Tom Beghin served on the faculties of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Schulich School of Music, of McGill University (Montreal). Since 2015, Prof. Beghin has been Senior Researcher and Principal Investigator at the Orpheus Institute for Advanced Studies & Research in Music, in Ghent, Belgium, and since 2024 holds a professorship again at KU Leuven. His research cluster, Declassifying the Classics, focuses on the intersections of technology, rhetoric, and performance.
It can't be easy to have been a son of the great Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was undoubtedly very strict, and if you'd have any composition ambitions, you would have to find a way to step out of the shadow of your father. Luckily, his sons had everything going for them considering their music. Whereas the traditional Baroque music of their father slowly went out of fashion, most of Bach's sons managed to follow the new trends of the early Classicism. In other words: relatively simple, melodic music which is not too heavy on the listener, yet still very passionate.
Carl Philipp Emanuel, Bach's fifth son, became the most outstanding among his siblings. Like each of Bach's sons, he received a solid education from his father, en Carl Philipp developed into a remarkably talented keyboardist. Moreover, he became a prolific composer and of all Bach's sons, he was able to came closest to the quality of his father's work, albeit in a completely different style.
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