ExclusiveBach: Concerto for 2 Harpsichords in C minor, BWV 1062 - Complete Performance

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Johann Sebastian Bach: Concerto for 2 Harpsichords in C minor, BWV 1062 - Complete Performance. This beautiful piece was played by Ruggero Gerlin and Huguette Dreyfus. It has common licence (Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal) and is provided through musopen.org.

This concerto for two harpsichords is a transcription of Bach's popular Concerto in D minor for Two Violins, BWV 1043. As with his other transcriptions of violin concertos, this work was transposed down a step to better suit the range of the harpsichord. Like those other transcriptions, it dates from the 1730's, when Bach provided harpsichord concertos for himself and his sons to play in the concerts of his Collegium Musicum.

By Bach's time, coffee was so well established as a popular vice that it had spawned coffeehouses all over Europe. Leipzig had several, but the proprietor of Zimmermann's Coffeehouse on the Catherinenstraße deserves our special gratitude for having had good taste not only in coffee but also in music. From 1720 until his death in 1741, he hosted concerts of the Collegium Musicum, an ensemble of professional and university musicians, in his coffeehouse on Friday evenings during the winter and in his coffee garden on Wednesday afternoons during the summer. Bach took over direction of the Collegium in 1729 and provided music for the ensemble and directed its concerts for over a decade.

For his Collegium programs, which were the closest he ever came to giving public concerts, Bach created, among other works, nearly all of his harpsichord concertos. In doing so, he essentially invented the idea of the solo keyboard concerto, the harpsichord having traditionally been an accompanist when playing with other instruments. (Only in the fifth Brandenburg Concerto had he experimented with the harpsichord as a soloist.) But the works themselves were not original compositions. All of Bach's solo and multiple harpsichord concertos, except for one double concerto in C major, are thought to be transcriptions of earlier works that were originally written for violin, oboe or other instruments. Of these earlier concertos, only three have survived, two concertos for violin and one for two violins, all of which have also come down to us in harpsichord transcriptions. But Bach undoubtedly wrote more concertos during that earlier time that are now lost. A good number of those are known only through their later transcriptions into harpsichord concertos. In a few cases, Bach would also use a concerto movement in a sinfonia or aria in a cantata, giving us what is presumably an intermediate version, as well.

In making a harpsichord version of a concerto for violin or some other single-line instrument, Bach altered many details, some of them in order to fit the new solo instrument, but some of them may also reflect his later thoughts about an earlier work. Among other things, he needed to provide parts for the left hand, and for this, he sometimes doubled the continuo bass, but he also frequently added new material. In certain passages, he changed idiomatic violin writing into passage work that would fit better under the hands of a keyboard player. He also often added ornamentation in the harpsichord version. And typically, he would transpose a violin concerto down a whole step to bring the solo part into the compass of a keyboard.
Source: https://baroque.boston/js-bach-concertos-for-multiple-harpsichords

What are your thoughts on the idyllic baroque-style video, filmed at Lake Brienz by Simone Schlegel and edited by Wenjing Ma.


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