Canadian-American cellist Elinor Frey performs and conducts Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s three cello concertos with the Accademia de’ Dissonanti. These dramatic works, rich in turbulent exchanges yet also in tender moments, bear witness to CPE Bach’s fiery imagination, where emotion and melody take precedence. In Bach’s time, personalizing a performance was both common and expected. The question of “how a cellist premiering these works would have approached these concertos” lies at the heart of this recording. Drawing on a vocabulary of ornamentation and melodic analysis derived from the music of the composer and his contemporaries, Frey has reconstructed the social milieu and instrumental practice of Bach’s time, in order to approach the way in which this music was once heard and felt.
Hearing these thrilling performances, one might forget that Elinor Frey is also a musicologist who has researched, prepared editions, and recorded definitive interpretations of works by Giuseppe Clemente Dall’Abaco – a lesser known 18th-century composer critical to the development of the cello. Her performance of the CPE Bach concertos resonates with Italian flair.
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