In addition to his enormous responsibilities in his final and most prestigious job as Kantor of the entire musical program at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig – where he produced weekly cantatas for the liturgical year, rehearsed the musicians, trained the boy choristers and taught Latin – Bach was also expected to put together the weekly concert of secular vocal and instrumental music for the Leipzig Collegium Musicum. The Collegium was a German university extra-curricular town-and-gown institution for which students and local musicians got together to perform at public gatherings. Bach’s surviving harpsichord concertos – transcriptions of concertos for other instruments – and the surviving violin concertos were probably composed for the Collegium.

Although the oboe and its double reed cousins played a significant role in Bach’s music, especially in the cantatas, there are no surviving solo or chamber works for this family of instruments. Many decades of research, however, have shown that all of Bach’s keyboard concertos were his own arrangements of his works originally composed for either violin or oboe – or both together. The keyboard concertos have been used to reconstruct the concertos, presumably in their original form, and the opinion today is unanimous that the Concerto No. 1 in C minor for Two Harpsichords and Strings, is a transcription of a concerto composed originally for oboe and violin. 

The oboe is a descendant of the medieval shawm and, as with all double reed instruments, it requires a great deal of power to force air through the tiny opening in the reed. Accustomed as we are to hearing this concerto in its two-keyboard version, we lose the sense of the sheer lung and diaphragm power necessary to get through the seemingly endless serpentine phrases of this work. Bach's wind parts are surely one of the inspirations – no pun intended – for the oboist’s technique of circular breathing, a difficult skill of inhaling through the nose while exhaling through the mouth. 

In this version of the Concerto, the violin part generally sounds subdued, since the soloist’s sound blends with the orchestral string instruments, while the oboe’s penetrating voice dominates the duo. As is typical of the Baroque concerto, each movement is based on a single theme, or ritornello, which is initially played by all the performers (ripieno) and then developed by the solo instrument(s) (concertino). In the energetic first movement, the oboe stands out among all the strings in the ritornello. In the solo sections, Bach maintains a running dialogue between the two instruments. He handles the dialogue differently in the second, slow movement, where each soloist weaves a line over the other sustained notes. In the third movement, the two soloists are pitted against the orchestra.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com