A Musical Bridge

I may be totally wide of the mark but I have the impression that Andrew Manze's term as director of The english Concert wasn't an unqualified success. It was certainly a fairly brief tenure compared to his predecessor Trevor Pinnock. Be that as it may, the disk up for consideration here is an excellent, comprising Symphonies 1 - 4 by C P E Bach plus Cello Concerto in A with soloist Alison McGillivray. CPE provided a musical bridge between the baroque and classical fashions and the symphonies in question here are closer to the classical. It is clear why he was admired by both Mozart and Beethoven. They are dramatic and powerful works and the English Concert give their all in spirited performances. Although the musical content was closing in on the classical, the form that CPE favoured still took the baroque three movement shape as opposed to the four movement convention taken up by Haydn. The cello concerto similarly takes a form that would have been familiar to Vivaldi but the vocabularly of the emotional expression used is moving forward. Alison McGillivray makes the most of her spell in the spotlight.