Prevailing Wind

The Beethoven wind music is, happily, already well represented in the catalogues. None of the pieces listed above has needed the help of the composer's bi-centenary to achieve a recording; and only, I believe, the doubtfully attractive Trio for piano, flute and bassoon is not otherwise at present available. Indeed the catalogues go better than this, producing in addition to the above list the Duos for clarinet and bassoon, the Trio for two oboes and cor anglais (both of these a happier sound than you might think), the Trio for piano, clarinet and cello, the Octet Rondino, and some flute oddities perhaps most likely to appeal to connoisseurs of that instrument.

This disc contains some sonatas for wind instruments by Johann Sebastian Bach from his years in Weimar (1708-17) and Cöthen (1717-23), having in common – as they have come down to us or as several musicologists have proposed – their being intended for the recorder and/or the oboe. The interchangeability of instrumentation, linked to different creative periods, to practical contingencies, and to the inexhaustible desire for perfection that induced the genius of Eisenach, according to the testimony of his earliest biographer Johann Nikolaus Forkel, to continually revise his own works, often makes it difficult to go beyond their sterile catalogue dates in tracing their evolution. For this reason an experimental approach was chosen here, to bring back to their presumably original state what today is a handful of works, which were part of a much larger repertory. Chamber music was becoming the composer’s principal occupation in the time period under consideration, which was decisive in the progress of Bach’s career from organist to Konzertmeister (1714) and then to Kapellmeister of a Calvinist court (1717) essentially devoted to the cultivation of secular music.