Symphony in F major (W183/3)

One great quality Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach inherited from his father, Johann Sebastian – along with a useful proportion of his genius – was his extraordinary creative energy. He composed a vast amount of music in the fifty or so years of his working life. Most of it was for the keyboard instruments he himself played so well, particularly the clavichord. But he also wrote a multitude of chamber pieces as part of his job at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin and, after his appointment as music director to Hamburg in 1768, literally dozens of often large-scale choral works for the city’s five main churches. As a symphonist he was less prolific – partly because his official duties rarely required that kind of work from him and partly because the symphony was not yet the major form it was to become by the end of the eighteenth century. So he wrote only nine short symphonies in Berlin, between 1741 and 1762, and ten more in Hamburg between 1773 and 1776.

The Symphony in F is one of the set of four – each one of which has effectively scored solo parts for wind and strings – ­which was first performed in Hamburg, presumably at one of the composer’s regular public concerts, in 1776. The opening gesture in forceful octaves could almost have been written by Mozart. The rest of the first movement, which makes good use of that gesture to hold together something more like a miniature concerto for orchestra than a movement in a symphony, could not. The approach to the Larghetto, which follows without a pause, is made by way of a near motionless but harmonically eventful transition. A more intimate inspiration than the outer movements, the Larghetto features solo strings offset by interventions for a larger ensemble with prominent flutes. Expressive though it is, however, it is too short to be much more than an introduction to what turns out to be a brilliantly entertaining Presto finale.

One great quality Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach inherited from his father, Johann Sebastian – along with a useful proportion of his genius – was his extraordinary creative energy. He composed a vast amount of music in the fifty or so years of his working life. Most of it was for the keyboard instruments he himself played so well, particularly the clavichord, but he also wrote a multitude of chamber pieces as part of his job at the court of Frederick the Great in Berlin and, after his appointment as music director to Hamburg in 1768, literally dozens of often large-scale choral works for the city’s five main churches. As a symphonist he was less prolific – partly because his official duties rarely required that kind of work from him and partly because the symphony was not yet the major form it was to become by the end of the eighteenth century. So he wrote only nine short symphonies in Berlin, between 1741 and 1762, and ten more in Hamburg between 1773 and 1776.

The Symphony in F is one of the set of four – each one of which has effectively scored obbligato parts for wind and solo strings – ­which was first performed in Hamburg, presumably at one of C.P.E’s regular public concerts, in 1776. The opening gesture in forceful octaves could almost have been written by Mozart. The rest of the first movement, which uses that gesture as a kind of ritornello to hold together something more like a miniature concerto for orchestra than a sonata movement, could not. The approach to the D minor of the Larghetto, made by way of a near motionless but harmonically eventful transition, is a particularly interesting departure. A more intimate inspiration than the outer movements, the Larghetto features solo strings offset by interventions for a larger ensemble with prominent flutes. Expressive though it is, however, it is too short to be much more than an introduction to what turns out to be a brilliantly entertaining Presto finale.