Hyperion Records

No 47 in E minor is a relatively unassuming Sonata, though even here the opening Adagio, a plaintive siciliano, features striking contrasts of lyricism and rhetoric. Like many of Emanuel Bach’s slow movements, it ends inconclusively. The sprightly contredanse theme of the E major Allegro sounds more typical of Haydn’s finales, while the finale proper is, again, a minuet, cast in condensed sonata form, without a central trio. Coincidentally or not, all three movements of the sonata begin with the same descending scale motif. (Capitalizing on Haydn’s prestige, the publisher Artaria later issued an alternative version of this sonata, transposing the first two movements up a semitone, prefacing them with an F major Moderato which doesn’t sound much like Haydn and almost certainly isn’t, and omitting the minuet finale. Despite its dubious provenance, this version became the better known and was the one catalogued by Hoboken as No 47.)

from notes by Richard Wigmore © 2012