Keith Jarrett needs no introduction as an interpreter of JS Bach, but the affective world of Carl Philipp Emanuel is such a different proposition that the prospect of reviewing this had me licking my lips. For the avoidance of doubt, this recording dates from the same period as those recordings of the elder Bach, seemingly the last in the series (May 1994, to be exact). One wonders why it took so long for ECM to issue it – unless it was because recording CPE on piano would not have been ‘the done thing’ back then. By Jarrett’s reckoning, he’d heard these sonatas played by harpsichordists and decided that ‘there was space left for a piano version’. In the intervening years other pianists have, too, and it’s no disrespect to them to say that Jarrett moves straight to the top of the list of interpreters on the instrument.

The fluent elegance of his recordings of CPE’s father is in evidence, a honeyed legato when called for, here and there the hint of an edge (though at first blush one’s surprised that there’s not more of it). Indeed, previous reviewers have expressed surprise that such a gifted improviser should seem almost diffident in his approach to the text in this repertory. (It is certainly surprising that he doesn’t make more of the repeats, given that he gives us all of them.) If anything, the question poses itself here even more, given the vagaries of mood that are CPE’s stock-in-trade; and yet, listening to other accounts on piano suggests a possible answer. Such mercurial twists are easily overcooked and might tip into mannerism (in the pejorative sense); whether this explains Jarrett’s preference to let the musical rhetoric speak through the form rather than over-hype the surface, the decision puts the ‘classical’ into ‘pre classical’, as in the pre-echoes of Beethoven’s Op 2 No 1 in the corresponding first movement of CPE’s A minor Sonata.

The pathos of the following Andante is below the surface, with just a pause towards the end by way of acknowledgement; but the main line and the counterpoints beneath are very nicely judged. It’s not that Jarrett is insensitive to the Sturm und Drang overtones; my one criticism would be that sudden strings of staccato chords or repeated notes, which hint at sudden resolve after a moment’s hesitation, could sometimes be more detached and emphatic. But the set seems to me to deepen in quality as it goes: the outgoing finale of the B flat major Sonata has a lightness of touch that eludes other pianists (and gets the staccato chords I mentioned spot on); the (major) slow movement of the B minor Sonata is a gem; and the echoes of the father in the Adagio of the E flat major are very touching (he would surely have seen the set published). Jarrett’s instinctive pianism makes his CPE set (as John Duarte wrote of his recording of the JS Bach viola sonatas with Kim Kashkashian) ‘one I can happily live with’.