Bach: Six Sonatas, BWV 1014-1019

All but the last of Johann Sebastian Bach’s six sonatas for violin and harpsichord (BWV 1014–19) commence with slow movements of intense feeling. This is music of implication and inference, the emotions no less real for their apparent lack of specificity. There is pleasure in the paradox: even without a text, the music sings. The copying and the performance of these sonatas were crucial to the mission of memorialising Bach’s music, but not merely as a matter of historical interest or archival fastidiousness. C. P. E. Bach described these works as among the best works of his 'dear departed father': they still sound very good and give me much joy, although they date back more than fifty years. They contain some Adagios that could not be written in a more singable manner today.' C. P. E. Bach’s well-worn copy of the Sonatas shows that he played them frequently. In this recording, Tuija Hakkila plays a copy of a Gottfried Silbermann 1747 fortepiano by Andrea Restelli. J. S. Bach played one of his fortepianos in 1747 in Potsdam for Frederick the Great and his court musicians. In his last years Bach even seems to have served as a dealer for Silbermann’s fortepianos in Leipzig.