Few composers have been brave enough to attempt a setting of “To be or not to be”, and CPE Bach was not one of them. Indeed, he seems to have been politely surprised when Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg, a minor man of Sturm und Drang letters, adapted Hamlet’s soliloquy to fit the right-hand part of one of Bach’s keyboard fantasias. Here we are given this vocal adaptation of the piece, a real proto-Romantic curiosity, and if the exercise ultimately tells us nothing about how Bach composed the piece, it does reveal just what an inspiration the expressive freedom of his keyboard-writing was to his contemporaries. Lorenzo Ghielmi takes that as the impulse for performances of a second Fantasia and a delectable pair of personal portraits from the Pièces de caractère in which pianistic boldness and communicative strength are in no way compromised by the delicate sound of his Silbermann copy.

The bulk of this release, however, is given over to Bach’s three sonatas for viola da gamba, two with continuo and the Trio with obbligato keyboard. While they inhabit the conversational world of the galant, it is clear that they were not intended for amateurs; this is technically challenging music and requires a player of Vittorio Ghielmi’s agile expertise to bring it off, a feat which he manages in vigorous style, robustly supported by his brother. If his sound might have benefited from more bass resonance (as it is, it is a little buzzy), this is nevertheless vibrant and urgently lyrical playing, possessed of a degree of personality that you would never guess from the bark-bread austerity of the disc’s artwork.