Cello Concerto No.2 in B flat major

It could be argued that Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s greatest service to music when he was working at the Prussian court in Potsdam was to get his father, Johann Sebastian, to visit him there in 1747 and so meet Frederick the Great himself – a meeting which resulted in the composition of The Musical Offering. While it is surely true that C.P.E. Bach achieved nothing of the quality of that J.S. Bach masterpiece, the hundreds of works he wrote during the 30 years of the Potsdam period, like the hundreds more he wrote in the next 20 years in Hamburg, were a vital link in the chain between high baroque, as represented by his father, and early Viennese classicism of Mozart and, particularly, Haydn.

The three cello concertos that C.P.E. Bach completed in Potsdam or Berlin in the early 1750s are clearly in the same tradition as the Cello Concerto in C that Haydn was to write at Esterháza in the early 1760s. Their kinship is not in the cello writing – which is less idiomatic in Bach’s case, inevitably, since all three concertos were originally scored for harpsichord or flute and only later arranged for cello – as in the construction. Unlike the classically orientated Cello Concerto in D that Haydn wrote 20 years later, the Concerto in C shares with C.P.E. Bach’s cello concertos the essential baroque feature of alternating orchestral and solo episodes.

The first movement of the present Concerto in B flat offers a clear and sophisticated example of “ritornello” form. The opening orchestral material is more than just an introduction: it contains not only the elegant opening melody on violins but also several other thematically significant ideas, including a rising figure in dotted rhythms first heard on lower strings. The ritornello recurs three times, the cello episodes in between offering development of the orchestral ideas, adding some of its own and, particularly in the second and last episodes, exercising itself in strenuous passages of technical bravura. The orchestra, which has kept in touch in the solo episodes largely by way of the rising figure in dotted rhythm, rounds off the construction with a last reminder of the opening material.

The melodious Adagio, which is based on the poignant material introduced by violins in the opening bars, gives the cello much more opportunity to be its expressive self in the solo episodes as well as offering an opportunity for a cadenza towards the end. In the contrastingly brilliant Allegro assai the composer turns from time to time, as his father might have done in similar circumstances, to the Vivaldi model, though not without including more reflective passages for the soloist in the midst of the virtuoso activity.

Gerald Larner ©2008