Keisuke Wakao Plays Bach, Mozart, Britten and Prokofiev

 Johann Christian Bach Between 1762 and 1767, Johann Christian Bach composed the Opus 8 quartet series: six two-movement quartets (originally) for flute, violin, viola and cello. The B-flat Quartet is the sixth and first appeared in print in 1772 in London together with the other five quartets as Op. 8. As he had done in his Op. 4 Trios, Bach was still clearly basing his work on examples by Sammartini and Tartini; however, in contrast to the Trios, he goes more for a contrapuntal-motivic movement technique. The simple elegance which characterizes most of his work is equally captivating in the Quartet in B-flat recorded here. As the representative of a galant, yet technically well-balanced style, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach exerted an important influence on the generation to come – thus also on Mozart, who wrote as follows to his father with regard to Bach‘s death: „You probably already know that Bach the Englishman has died? – What a loss for the world of music!”