Johann Sebastian Bach (b. 1685, Eisenach – d. 1750, Leipzig, Germany) during his lifetime was better known as an organist than a composer. Born in a family of practical musicians and composers stretching back several generations, he received his first musical instruction from his father and brother. His beautiful soprano voice helped him get a choral scholarship, but after the change of voice he becomes a performer, playing violin and keyboards. In his twenties, along with the career of organist and court musician, Bach began a sustained period of composing keyboard and orchestral works. Being open to influences from abroad, he extended the prevailing structures with dynamic, rhythmic and harmonic patterns found in Italian music of Vivaldi and Corelli. He was using counterpoint to create rich and detailed compositions and masterfully used the melody to suggest actions and invoke emotions. During his thirties, while employed at Prince Leopold’s court and having no formal church music duties, was Bach’s most prolific period of instrumental chamber music writing. He wrote concertos for orchestras, dance suites and sonatas for multiple instruments, as well as pieces for solo instruments. He spent his later years as the organist and teacher at St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, and composing cantatas and musical interpretations of the Bible. Bach left behind over 1,100 works that represent the essence of the Baroque era.

Partita in A Minor for Solo Flute BWV 1013, one of the most sophisticated items of flute repertoire, is the only Bach work for flute alone, and consists of some of the most difficult writing for the baroque transverse flute. This piece offers to the flutist limitless opportunities for phrasing and nuance of interpretation. Partita has a form of a four-movement dance suite. The opening movement is the highly ornamented Allemande which, with long sequences of sixteenth notes and lack of places to breathe, raised doubts about this being a flute piece. The Courante continues in similar fashion, without a single rest in the entire movement. However, this movement is more in line with what Bach’s contemporaries were composing for the flute, with wide leaps between the highest and lowest register of the instrument, producing at the same time the melody and the effect of bass. The third movement is the slow and contemplative Sarabande, which brings balanced phrases with an important stylistic feature of ornamentation to the repeats. The work concludes on a lighter note with a Bourrée Angloise which, despite ‘English’ in its name, is a French-styled contradanse, very fashionable at the time of composition. Its melodic range is primarily in the lowest octave of the instrument as was common in French style flute music at the time, but occasional and unpretentious appearance of chromaticism reveals the true touch of Bach.