Johann Sebastian Bach was a trained organist. He taught himself composition with chorale arrangements and improvisations of the toccata and fugue. The Baroque concerto was a different matter – and nevertheless became a formative experience for the young Bach when he began to copy concertos by Albinoni, Vivaldi and Marcello around 1709/10. He learned three things from the Italian scores: first, how to organize the music with tutti and solo passages; second, how to design a development that passes through different keys; and third, how to treat themes that can be broken down into motifs.
Over time, Bach also arranged works by his colleagues for keyboard instruments, for example, Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, which will be heard in its original version at today’s concert. The fugue, which is rarely found in works by Vivaldi, probably interested Bach the contrapuntist as much as the acoustic appeal of the overlapping violins at the beginning. In Alessandro Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D minor, on the other hand, he could observe how the solo and tutti interact with each other. In the first movement, the oboe is juxtaposed with the unison of the strings; they fashion the finale together with identical material.
Bach’s own concertos range from the highly virtuosic solo Concerto for Harpsichord in D minor, BWV 1052, with extended cadenzas, to complex group concertos such as the First and Third Brandenburg Concertos, the first movements of which Bach used again as cantata sinfonias (the Sinfonia of “Falsche Welt”, BWV 52, and the Sinfonia of “Ich liebe den Höchsten”, BWV 174). The Triple Concerto in A minor is based on a keyboard work that Bach composed in Weimar during his first period of enthusiasm for the concerto genre and reworked 20 years later. With its triplets, the newly composed tutti ritornello already displays characteristics of the galant style, while the imaginativeness of the playful solo passages is far removed from the thematic material of the beginning.
