This recital — recorded, presumably, at the home of Tini Mathot and producer Ton Koopman — gathers five sonatas for harpsichord and flute, plus a solo sonata in G minor for harpsichord.
Keen-eyed readers will notice that the cover specifies a recorder. The liner notes address the choice, but inconclusively for my taste: they acknowledge the recorder's dynamic limitations and the adjustments its range forces. The notes' own reasoning, in fact, points the other way. Flauto, they concede, ordinarily means recorder — but given the range of the part, and C.P.E. Bach's position at the court of Frederick the Great, where the traverso reigned, these are conventionally read as traverso sonatas. They add, fairly, that Bach knew the recorder and wrote for it, citing his sonata for bass recorder, viola, and continuo.
The notes make a parallel point about the keyboard: Clavier named whatever you had to hand, and you played what was in the room.
Bach spent years at Frederick's court, where his colleague J.J. Quantz — Frederick's own flute teacher — presided over the traverso, the transverse flute we know today. The historical case, then, points firmly at the traverso: it was Frederick's instrument, Quantz's instrument, the Berlin default. But eighteenth-century practice was elastic enough that a recorder reading is a legitimate interpretive choice, and I've no quarrel with it in principle. My quarrel is that the notes never make the affirmative case for it. They tell me why these are usually considered traverso works, then hand me a recorder without saying why. Read between the lines and you sense the real answer — a close and long working friendship between Verhagen and Mathot — but I'd rather they said so plainly.
Each sonata here follows a three-movement plan. The notes describe the flute-and-keyboard sonatas as the composer's own arrangements of earlier works for two soloists and keyboard. Bach's entrepreneurship aside, one can't finally say what he meant by giving old pieces new dress — though the very fact of the practice, I think, speaks to how loosely the period held its instrumental assignments, and quietly supports a recorder here. Composers wrote for specific instruments, yes; but I've yet to meet evidence, from this period or his father's, that playing a piece on something other than the instrument named was frowned upon.
In re-dressing them, Bach gave these pieces a second life. Something first written to build Frederick's flute technique could now be taken up by amateurs at large — I can't prove that, but the brevity and the modest substance both point to a pedagogical or domestic use case.
The shortest work is the solo keyboard sonata, H.21, Wq. 65/11, in G minor — and it's the one I keep returning to. The microphones seem to have been moved for it; the feeling is markedly different, and Mathot plays with more evident confidence, though how much of that is her and how much the composer's shift in manner I can't fully separate. It makes real economy of its material. Whether it's the minor mode lending a gravity the major-key sonatas never reach, or something in the work's origin or dating that I can't pin down, I won't pretend to know why it holds me as it does — but it does. I can imagine working up the opening movement and feeling genuinely pleased to arrive at its close. The middle movement reads like a study in carrying a melodic line in the right hand over a left-hand accompaniment; the finale, a study in dynamic shading — a solo voice set against something like a small orchestra. It has real charm, and Mathot is an ideal advocate for it.
Whatever the recorder gives up, none of it registers as deficiency in these performances. And that is the rub for the historical argument: the fact that adjustments have to be made — an instrument swapped, a note nudged up or down an octave — doesn't help the recorder's case, but in Verhagen's hands the compromises never show.
The diminutive scale of these pieces makes me wonder how they were actually used. I'd be surprised if they saw much public performance; I suspect they were played mostly for the pleasure of the players themselves. Picture two friends sitting down to make music together — that, for me, is the life these works were built for: domestic music, house entertainment in Bach's day. And here I owe them fairness for what they are rather than what they aren't. On their own terms — intimate, companionable, scaled to the small room — they succeed. The playing is polished, and the five flute-and-keyboard sonatas are polite, here and there clever, and, all in major keys, cheery by disposition. They simply don't aim very high, and I'm not much moved by the aim.
So: a fine recording of music that doesn't speak to me loudly. When I assign stars, the number isn't solely a reflection of how well the disc is played — I think of it more the way you'd rate a film, where the final mark folds together the performances, the material, and the overall impression the thing leaves. Well-played but slight music lands in the middle.
I wouldn't recommend this album to everyone. If you love the recorder, or C.P.E. Bach, or you're weighing whether to play these yourself, it takes on real value. But taken whole, the album is weak — not because of the performances, but because of the pieces themselves.
