Bach Harpsichord Concertos

Towards the end of his life, Johann Sebastian Bach made a second collection of concertos, these for keyboard. Around 1738 he put this together, possibly as a way of publicizing his work with the Leipzig Collegium , or possibly with an eye towards publishing them. The six works are all somewhat eclectic since they seem to have been transcriptions of works for other instruments, as the informative booklet notes by soloist Aapo Häkkinen state. There are other sources in the Bach archives, so how he put them together can more or less be traced, and in recording these, Häkkinen and his Helsinki Baroque Orchestra have decided that they would be split into two volumes.

This is the first volume in a complete survey of Bach's harpsichord concertos, recorded by La Risonanza and Fabio Bonizzoni in one-to-a-part practice performance.

Bach is often credited with having invented the keyboard concerto, despite the fact that all of his works in the mode were arrangements of existing concertos for other instruments. Furthermore, whatever influence they may have had was indirect. It’s unlikely that either Haydn or Mozart had heard any of this music or even knew of its existence. But Haydn may have encountered the keyboard concertos of Carl Philippe Emanuel, and Mozart knew Johann Christian’s works in the genre. Nevertheless the elder Bach’s concertos, whether played on a harpsichord, or on a piano, retain a revered place in the keyboard literature.

Francesco Corti and il pomo d’oro continue their acclaimed series of Bach harpsichord concertos with a recording of the concertos BWV 1044, 1054, 1056 and 1057. This completes the cycle of seven “official” harpsichord concertos that Bach composed. Many of them are masterful reworkings of existing material, either own compositions or works by contemporaries, showing Bach’s exceptional skill to present musical ideas in a different light. For their second Bach recording, Corti and il pomo d’oro have chosen to work with a relatively small ensemble, in order to bring out the individuality of each melodic line.

If you’re looking for an acceptable, low-cost cycle of Bach’s harpsichord concertos, this Brilliant Classics set may be of interest. Discs 1 and 2 contain all of the concertos for solo harpsichord and continuo, as well as the Concerto BWV 1060 for two harpsichords and Concerto BWV 1065 for four harpsichords, performed by the modern-instrument ensemble Neues Bachisches Collegium Musicum, with soloist Christine Schornsheim, joined by fellow harpsichordists Armin Thalheim, Mechtild Stark, and Violetta Liebsch in the multiple keyboard works. These performances were originally issued in the U.S. nearly 25 years ago on the now defunct Capriccio label.