Concerto

This disc is the first of a projected complete survey of Bach’s concertos for harpsichord and strings. Most of them are the composer’s own arrangements, at Leipzig, of earlier works which he probably prepared for his sons and pupils to play at the collegium musicum concerts of which he was director during the 1730s and early 1740s. As well as the great D minor Concerto, the first volume contains those in F minor and E major, and a new reconstruction by Masato Suzuki of another D minor piece which has survived only as a nine-bar fragment. Taking as his starting point the introductory sinfonia of Bach’s cantata, Geist und Seele wird verwirret (BWV 35), whose opening bars are almost identical to the fragment, Suzuki has created a work whose remaining two movements are developed from an aria and a second sinfonia belonging to the same cantata. All these concertos, in fact, contain music to be found elsewhere among Bach’s cantatas.