It is easy to think of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach as an underachiever of sorts; owing to his limited output -- at least compared to his younger siblings -- and his reputation as a lush and as the loser of roughly a third of Johann Sebastian Bach's output that had been willed to his care. When you combine such foreknowledge with the notion that he composed six duets for two flutes, produced in great numbers for the amateur market in the eighteenth century, one might deduce that recording such works by the eldest Bach son would be a negligible pursuit at best. That is certainly not the case with Accent's Wilhelm Friedemann Bach: Six Duets for Two Flutes; this is a highly compelling and endlessly fascinating collection of pieces that places the use of canonic procedures within the Bach family into an entirely different context.
"Pieces set if very difficult keys must be played only before listeners who understand the instrument," wrote Johann Joachim Quantz in 1752, "and are able to grasp the difficulty of these keys on it; they must not be played before everyone." Quantz was specifically speaking about the eighteenth century transverse flute, a solid wooden instrument with a single key employed in this excellent recording by recorder virtuosi
Barthold Kuijken and Marc Hantaï. Based in Dresden, Quantz was among the likely musicians for whom the first four of these duets were intended, and he was not an amateur by any standing; Quantz thought them good enough to pull examples from them in a flute method he published in 1752. The other two duets are very late works, written in the 1770s, and are keeping with the stylistically unpredictable and eccentric manner found in Bach's last keyboard works, though the earlier set of four are in ways just as challenging. Sometimes a phrase will start in strict canon, with a brightly colored, Italianate theme, and one thinks, "Dad!" However, along the way, Wilhelm Friedemann might stick in an extra note somewhere, resulting in an asymmetrical pattern, and then one thinks, "Not Dad." Asymmetry is a distinctive hallmark of the eldest Bach's canonic thinking. How to match up irrevocable elements into a unified whole with some manner of sophistication is the issue at hand. In this sense, Bach is not only successful, but the great variety of unpredictable textures he achieves and the great care taken not to run wholly off the rails is an integral part of what keeps the cycle of six interesting, even at times nail-biting.
Kuijken and Hantaï demonstrate a facility with these difficult period instruments that would have astounded Quantz, and the disc is anything but boring. Accent's Wilhelm Friedemann Bach: Six Duets for Two Flutes will prove essential for flute players or a Wilhelm Friedemann Bach enthusiast, though its appeal is not nearly as limited as one might think.