JS Bach’s second son did well out of his 2014 tercentenary year, and exploration of his quirky, eccentric music continues. This keyboard collection juxtaposes logically structured sonatas that bridge the gap between Haydn and early Beethoven – the skipping first movement of the F minor sonata anticipating Beethoven’s Op 2 is a particular delight — with a couple of zany fantasias that remind one of Basil Lam’s unfair dismissal of CPE’s music as “the all-too-easy surprises of a style where anything can happen”. Riccardo Cecchetti plays them all with fire and a fine sense of direction, using a rather gentle German fortepiano of around 1785, which has almost all the flexibility and expressiveness of a clavichord, but with added projection and bite, so that the fierce accents really tell.
