Without the need to conform to historical or stylistic program arranging I find it wonderful simply to free-associate composers, styles, genres. I find myself listening to myself listening and enjoying every unlikely minute of it.
In the process I am getting a whole new sense of what a sonata really is: It is a mini-program, complete unto itself, with a song, a dance, a complicated puzzle piece (usually the first movement) and a game at the end combining two or more of the above. So why on earth would anyone play more than one sonata on a program?
There must have been a reason. Probably a pretentious reason.
One afternoon my adult children and I were invited to a concert featuring three (count them) Bach cantatas. On the way home my daughter (a singer/song-writer/musician of extraordinary versatility) remarked that it was too much: Surely one cantata was meant to be sufficient for one occasion.
She was right. The programmers got it wrong.
Or perhaps it is that we, the consumers of CDs, now want the experience of live music to be as much like that as possible.
