Are you ready for extreme 18th century keyboard? The typically sparse packaging graphics of this ECM release may indicate only to German speakers what's contained inside: a "Tangentenflügel" is a tangent piano, a rare keyboard instrument of Mozart's time that used hammers, striking the strings at a tangent, but no dampers. The sound combines qualities of a clavichord (its nearest relative, but the tangent piano is louder), a fortepiano, and a harpsichord. Occasional recordings using the instrument exist, but this one by ...
Read More
Are you ready for extreme 18th century keyboard? The typically sparse packaging graphics of this ECM release may indicate only to German speakers what's contained inside: a "Tangentenflügel" is a tangent piano, a rare keyboard instrument of Mozart's time that used hammers, striking the strings at a tangent, but no dampers. The sound combines qualities of a clavichord (its nearest relative, but the tangent piano is louder), a fortepiano, and a harpsichord. Occasional recordings using the instrument exist, but this one by Russian keyboardist Alexei Lubimov may be the first one to really show what it can do. Lubimov states that the tangent piano is especially well suited to the music of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, with its "affects, diversity of rhetoric, melancholy humor, paradoxical harmonic effects, idiosyncratic rhythms." There's no evidence that these particular pieces were played on a tangent piano, but Bach is known to have had access to one at the court of Frederick the Great, and the results here...
Read Less
