Skip to main content

Hear Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos Played on Original Baroque Instruments

“Subtle and brilliant at the same time, they are a microcosm of Baroque music, with an astonishingly vast sample of that era’s emotional universe.” — Ted Libbey 

The portfolio, the demo, the head shot, the resume…. These are not materials made for general consumption, much less the praise and admiration of posterity. But not every applicant is Johann Sebastian Bach, who wrote his six Brandenburg concertos, in essence, “because, like pretty much everyone throughout history, Bach needed a job,” notes String Ovation. In 1721, he applied for a position with the Margrave of Brandenburg, younger brother of King Frederick Wilhelm I of Prussia, by sending the music: “It’s one of the few manuscripts that Bach wrote out himself, rather than give to a copyist…. At the time, Bach was the Kapellmeister in the small town of Cöthen. Working for His Royal Highness would have been a seriously upward move.”

He didn’t get the job. Indeed, it seems his application was ignored, and nearly lost several times throughout history. Now, Bach’s calling cards are some of the most virtuoso compositions of Baroque music we know. “Each concerto is a concerto grosso, a concerto that’s a continuous interplay of small groups of soloists and full orchestra…. The range of instruments with solos throughout the six concertos was designed to give opportunities to show the potential of nearly every instrument in the orchestra. Even the recorder got a solo.” The six together present themselves as an anthology of sorts, “a Baroque musical travelogue moving through ‘the courtly elegance of the French suite, the exuberance of the Italian solo concerto and the gravity of German counterpoint.’”

These pieces do not only demonstrate Bach’s compositional mastery; they also represent his “ultimate view,” as the Netherlands Bach Society points out, “of the most important large-scale instrumental genre of his day: the concerto.” In the third of these works, for example, he makes the “surprising” choice to compose for “three violins, three violas, three cellos and basso continuo. In other words, 3×3, which is a rational choice you would expect from a modernist like Pierre Boulez, rather than a Baroque composer like Bach.” In order to play these pieces the way Bach intended them to be heard, Ted Libbey writes at NPR, they must be played on the original instruments for which he composed, something a growing number of ensembles have been doing.

Voices of Music, one of the most prominent ensembles recovering the original sounds of Bach’s time, performs Concerto Number Three in G Major at the top and Concerto Number Six in B Flat just above, another surprising arrangement for the time. The final Brandenburg Concerto also upsets the musical order of things again: “Violins — usually the golden boys of the orchestra,” writes the Netherlands Bach Society, “are conspicuous by their absence! Instead, two violas play the leading role. As the highest parts, they ‘play first fiddle’ as soloists, supported by two viola da gambas, a cello, double bass and harpsichord.” The Margrave of Brandenburg, it seems had little time or interest, and never had these pieces performed by his ensemble, which may have lacked the skill and instrumentation. After hearing this music in its original glory, we can be grateful Bach’s handwritten resume survived the neglect.

Related Content: 

Hear 10 of Bach’s Pieces Played on Original Baroque Instruments

The Authentic Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons: Watch a Performance Based on Original Manuscripts & Played with 18th-Century Instruments

Watch J.S. Bach’s “Air on the G String” Played on the Actual Instruments from His Time

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Hear Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos Played on Original Baroque Instruments is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooksFree Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2UrjUKb
via Ilumina

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_108_10-7-21.mp3 As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges , educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason , and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more. Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan. Some articles that fed our discussion included: “ The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism ” by Luke Winkie “ Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular ” by Darron Cu...