CONCERTO IN C MINOR FOR OBOE, VIOLIN AND ORCHESTRA, AFTER BWV 1060

Johann Sebastian Bach
(b. Eisenach, Germany, March 21, 1685; d. Leipzig, July 28, 1750)

Composed c.1717-23; 14 minutes

With a family of gifted musicians, it is not surprising that Bach wrote concertos for one, two, three and even four harpsichords to showcase their talents. Tonight’s concerto has come down to us as a concerto for two harpsichords. Performances took place at the Leipzig collegium musicum, a kind of mixed professional and gifted amateur concert-giving society that presented weekly concerts in a coffeehouse and, in the summer, in a coffee garden by the city gate. Bach organized music for the society, and his sons Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel were among the soloists, along with other gifted pupils. Like Bach’s seven solo keyboard concertos, all the multi-harpsichord concertos are arrangements of existing music. No model survives for today’s C minor Concerto, BWV 1060. Its two solo parts were clearly written with different solo instruments in mind, since one of them offers such violin-like passages as broken chords and fast alternations across adjacent strings, around a single note. The other offers more melodic, sustained lines and a range that does not go lower than the oboe’s lowest note. So, Bach experts have long agreed that this C minor Concerto for two harpsichords had its origins in a lost concerto for oboe, violin and orchestra by Bach and that this concerto was probably written during Bach’s years in Cöthen (1717-23). Tonight’s reconstructed concerto follows the pattern of the standard three-movement Italian concerto. The opening movement presents the main theme in a myriad of variations before returning to its original form towards the end. The slow movement contains some of Bach’s most poetic, melodically sustained music, heard over gently pulsing chords. The finale presents an elegantly worked-out dialogue on a dancing, Bourée-like theme.