Bach - Brandenburg Concertos - Classic FM Schedule Bach - Brandenburg Concertos J. S. Bach composed this famous collection of six concertos (BWV 1046-51) between 1708-1721, although they weren't known as the 'Brandenburg' Concertos until 150 years later. For a gateway into the world of Baroque music you can do no better than Bach’s 'Brandenburg' Concertos. Written between 1708-1721 for Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg, they are based on the Italian concerto grosso style. Bach composed them when he was Kapellmeister (music director) in the small town of Cöthen, presumably for various members of the Cöthen Court Orchestra, the composer gave them the unofficial title of ‘Six concertos for several instruments’. The concerto grosso form was pioneered by Italian composers like Archangelo Corelli, but Bach’s Brandenburgs took the form to new heights. They changed music by demonstrating the potential of an already-established form.

Bach gave each instrumental family solo opportunities and created unusual combinations, like inclusion of violas and violas da gamba in No. 6 (which is also notable for its absence of violins), the exciting use of the harpsichord in No. 5, and the virtuosic violin lines in No. 4. Each of the six concertos appeals most to different listeners, from the galumphing first, the more stately second, the homely third, the lofty fourth and the galloping fifth right through to the joyous sixth. They form a sort of musical job application; Bach packaged them up for the Margrave in the hope that he might secure some form of employment. Sadly for Bach, there appears to be no record of him ever having received a reply from the Margrave, and no evidence the Margrave himself even heard them played. In a sense it's lucky Bach was unfortunate in his employment - perhaps if he'd been employed by the Margrave, he would not have become Cantor of the Thomasschule at Thomaskirche in Leipzig just two years later in 1723.

While in Cöthen, he also wrote his Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello and the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin. Bach News Bach: The Genius Who Wrote the Brandenburg Concertos Bach: The Genius Who Wrote the Brandenburg Concertos by DavidPaulWagner Regarded as the greatest composer of the Baroque period of classical music, Johann Sebastian Bach produced amazing sacred and secular music that moves us still. The powerful and moving music of Johann Sebastian Bach can touch even the casual listener. His great music for orchestra, choirs and for single instruments (such as the organ) demonstrates astonishing contrapuntal invention, unique harmonies, memorable motives, and wonderful rhythms, sonorities and textures. Bach's Life Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenbach, Germany in 1685. His family was very musical and he learned to play the violin, the harpsichord and the clavichord at an early age. He also learned to sing. Bach became an orphan at the age of 10 and was brought up by his elder brother. He attended St Michael's School in Luneberg. In 1703 he became organist at Arnstadt.

In 1708 he as organist in the court at Weimar. In 1711 he worked as Kapellmeister (director of music) in the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothar. While in this position Bach wrote the Brandenburg Concertos, The Well-Tempered Clavier, and other instrumental music. From 1723 he worked as Cantor (musical director) and director of the Thomasschule (St. Thomas's choir school) in Leipzig from 1723 until his death. While in this last position, Bach wrote the St. Matthew Passion, the Mass in B Minor and approximately 300 church cantatas. Bach married twice and had 20 children. His first wife, Maria Barbara Bach, was his cousin. After she passed away in 1720, Bach married his wife, Anna Magdalena Bach, and they had thirteen children together. Anna was a soprano and, when Bach became almost completely blind in his last years, she worked along with him on music composition. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (by J. S.

Bach) Organist: Kurt Ison Bach's Music Bach is now regarded as the foremost composer of the Baroque era and as one of the greatest composers of all time. However, during his own lifetime Johann Sebastian Bach achieved modest fame as a talented player of the harpsichord and of the organ. His musical compositions were not truly appreciated by his contemporaries. In fact, after his death his music fell out of fashion and was rarely performed. It was only in the 19th century when Bach was "rediscovered" by the German composer, Felix Mendelssohn, that the genius of Bach's music began to be studied and appreciated. In 1829 Mendelssohn performed the St. Matthew Passion in Berlin. In 1850 the Bach Gesellschaft (Bach Society) was founded. A great revival of interest in Bach followed.

Some of the key Bach masterpieces include: -- the Brandenburg Concertos (1721); Learning to Listen: Brandenburg Concertos | Classical MPR Learning to Listen: Brandenburg Concertos 58min 54sec margrave christian ludwig von Brandenburg-Schwedt Artist: Antoine Pesne; public domain Last week on Learning to Listen, we heard some of the specific characteristics of Baroque music, like the sound of a harpsichord, or certain ways composers wrote melodies, or listening for music that has lots of trills and decorations to the notes. Today, we'll hear three of the six Brandenburg Concertos, written by Johann Sebastian Bach. The Brandenburg Concertos are excellent examples of music from the Baroque Era. Bach wrote these sometime before the year 1721  he met a music lover named Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg who asked Bach to send him some concertos. Bach didn't write the concertos from scratch; he had already written all six of these in some way, shape or form, but Bach handpicked them for the margrave to demonstrate his versatility as a composer.

And the Brandenburgs are diverse  about as diverse a set of six pieces you'll find. Each one of the six concertos features instrumental soloists, or highlights specific groups of instruments, meaning we can (more or less) call them each a concerto grosso. Concerto No. 1: Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 sounds the most generic to me at its beginnings, but there are tiny details that pop out of the texture. The hunting horns, for one. This Concerto features the hunting horns, oboes, violins and bassoon at various times, as well as a smaller violin called the violino piccolo. The second movement is a passionate, musical sigh. There are these sad cries from the oboe and violin  it's absolutely gorgeous. Listen for the three-note half-step or whole-step motive (a motive that's central to several of the Brandenburgs). A couple other odd things about Brandenburg Concerto No. 1  not only is it the only Brandenburg Concerto with 4 movements  it's the only concerto Bachever wrote that had four movements.

And, through the course of music history, you'll see far more concertos that have three movements than four. The fourth movement is a strange little minuet and for a bit inside it, it's only oboes and a bassoon playing for about a minute and a half. Included in the fourth movement is a polonaise  or in Italian it's called a polacca. You'll hear the hunting horns playing during the polacca. Concerto No. 2: The Second Brandenburg is the only one of the six that has trumpets in it. Well ... one trumpet. Trumpet, oboe, flute/recorder and violin are the soloists in this concerto  a bit strange since all those instruments are more or less in the same range, but it works. The trumpet sits out for the second movement. Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 is the one on the Golden Record that's on the Voyager space probes launched in 1977. Also, it was used as the theme song for William F Buckley's Firing Line. Concerto No.

3: Bach was a numbers guy, so he more than likely put this particular concerto in the third spot because of how it's organized musically: three violins, three violas and three cellos, with a bass and a harpsichord. There aren't any wind instruments in Brandenburg 3. That three-note motive is back for this one in the first movement. It's the second movement that's weird, though. Bach intended it to be improvised and only included two chords  total  for the entire second movement. Ensembles are usually creative with this anomaly, sometimes using music from other pieces Bach wrote; some recordings use the slow movement from his Violin Sonata in G because it's in the same key, and it ends the same way. It makes it fun to hear these performed live, because you never know what to expect. Next week, we'll hear Concertos 4 to 6, and then we'll be done with the Baroque era for a bit!

Gallery margrave christian ludwig von Brandenburg-Schwedt Artist: Antoine Pesne; public domain About the author Top 10 Most Famous Classical Music Composers - History Lists HISTORY LISTS You are here: History Lists · People · Top 10 Most Famous Classical Music Composers Top 10 Most Famous Classical Music Composers Classical music may not enjoy as much popularity as it used to in its golden age from 17th to the early 20th century. But it continues to impress and inspire, especially the works by the greatest composers of all times. Some of them may have lived hundreds of years ago but their masterpieces simply remain unsurpassed. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) German organist, composer, violist and violinist is widely regarded as one of the best classical composers of all times.

He wrote over 1100 compositions which include cantatas, songs and arias, chorales, passions and oratorios, organ works, works for harpsichord, concertos,… Best known works by Bach include the Brandenburg Concertos, Air on the G String, Toccata and Fugue in D minor and Arioso, to mention only a few. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Austrian composer impressed his contemporaries already as a child. At the age of 5, he mastered keyboard and violin, and entertained the social elites including royalty throughout Europe. Mozart composed more than 600 works in all music genres known in his time. Some of most famous and most widely performed Mozart’s works include Requiem, Symphony No. 40, operas The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro, Piano Sonata No 16 in C Major, Symphony No. 25, Piano Concerto No. 21 and Piano Sonata No. 11 (Mov. 3 - Turkish March).

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) German composer and pianist was the most outstanding figure in the transition between Classical and Romantic periods, and one of the most famous classical music composers of all times. Some of his best works including the 9th symphony were created after he became almost completely deaf. Other notable works by Beethoven include Sonata No. 14 (Moonlight Sonata), 5th Symphony, 6th Symphony, Bagatelle No. 25 (Für Elise) and Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op.73. Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) The celebrated Italian composer is best known for his operas that remain popular to this day. His musical career, however, didn’t start smoothly. After his wife’s death and failure of his second opera (Un giorno di regno), he fell into despair and nearly give up composing. Fortunately, La Scala’s impressario convinced him to write Nabucco which was a huge success. Soon, more followed and Verdi established himself as the dominant figure of the 19th century Italian classical music.

Verdi’s most famous operas besides Nabucco include La traviata, Rigoletto, Aida, Don Carlos, Otello and Falstaff. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) Most famous Russian classical music composer wrote in a variety of genres. He composed symphonies, operas, concertos, chamber music, sacred choral music, overtures, suites and ballets. Some of his best known works include his three ballets The Nutcracker, Swan Lake and the Sleeping Beauty, Marche Slave, First Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor, Overture 1812, Symphony No. 6, Fantasy Overture (Romeo and Juliet), Serenade for Strings and opera Eugene Onegin. Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) Just like Mozart, Chopin was a very gifted child and established himself as one of the foremost Polish composers at a very young age. One of the best piano composers and virtuoso pianists in history wrote almost exclusively for solo piano. But he also wrote two piano concertos and three sonatas.

Chopin is also credited with the invention of the instrumental ballade and several musical innovations. Some of his best known works include Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 9 No. 2, Funeral March (Prelude in C minor), Minute Waltz (Waltz in D-flat major), Revolutionary Etude (Op.10, No.12) and Fantasie-Impromptu (Op. Posth. 66). Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) Italian Baroque composer and violin virtuoso continues to be admired throughout the globe for his works, especially for his instrumental concertos for violin. His greatest masterpiece is a series of violin concertos called Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons). In total, Vivaldi composed more that 500 concertos of which more than half are for solo instruments and strings, mainly for violin. Other works include operas, sacred choral music, symphonies, sonatas and chamber music. Of these is probably best known choral composition Gloria.

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) He is widely referred to as “the greatest Italian opera composer after Verdi” and “the last of Italy’s great opera composers”. His works – La Boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, Il trittico and Turandot are indeed masterpieces and are among the most widely performed operas in the standard repertoire. The mentioned operas also contain a number of outstanding stand-alone arias including Mi chiamano Mimi, O soave fanciulla, Che gelida manina, E lucevan le stelle, Un bel di vedremo, O mio babbino caro and Nessun Dorma. George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) German-born British composer is widely considered one of the greatest masters of the Baroque era and one of Britain’s foremost classical composers. He wrote over 40 operas, 29 oratories, more than 100 cantatas, duets and trios, 16 organ concertos and a number of arias, ecumenical pieces, chamber music, odes and serenatas.

His greatest works include the Messiah, Sarabande, Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks, to mention only a few. Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) Russian born French and then American composer, conductor and pianist is one of the most outstanding and influential 20th century composers. He was and still is admired worldwide for the novelty of his works which, however, also caused a great deal of controversy in his time. Stravinsky’s greatest works include The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, A Soldier’s Tale, The Song of the Nightingale, Mavra, Oedipus Rex, the Symphony in C and the Symphony in Three Movements. San Francisco Symphony - BACH: Brandenburg Concertos San Francisco Symphony No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048 No. 2 in F major, BWV 1047 No. 6 in B-flat major, BWV 1051 Brandenburg Concertos No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048 No. 2 in F major, BWV 1047 No.

6 in B-flat major, BWV 1051 Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Thuringia, on March 21, 1685, and died in Leipzig, Saxony, on July 28, 1750. He wrote the six Brandenburg concertos not later than March 1721, probably at Cöthen. At their first performances, he presumably played the harpsichord solo in No. 5 and violin or viola in the others. The San Francisco Symphony first played No. 3 in February 1914 under Henry Hadley's direction. It was played here most recently in November 2009, with Alexander Barantschik leading. Duration: about twelve minutes. Concerto No. 2 was first performed here in February 1931 with Issay Dobrowen on the podium; the most recent performances, in February 2007, were led by Alexander Barantschik. Duration: about thirteen minutes. Concerto No. 6 was introduced here in January 1973 with conductor Seiji Ozawa; Jaime Laredo led the most recent performances in April 1993.

Duration: about eighteen minutes. All instrumentations listed in the program note are translated from Bach's autograph. Bach was thirty-two when he assumed the position of Kapellmeister at the Court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt in Cöthen, in December 1717. It was a big decision for the composer, who already had a perfectly good job as orchestra leader for the Duke of Weimar, where he had worked since 1708. The Duke refused to accept Bach’s resignation and had him held under arrest for a month before he finally relented and let his orchestra leader go. But the allures of Cöthen were substantial. Leopold’s passion for music was boundless. He was himself a reasonably accomplished performer on the viola da gamba and, to a lesser extent, as a violinist and harpsichordist. As a teenager the Duke had convinced his mother to start hiring a musical staff with whom he could play chamber music when he was at home in Cöthen, and by the time he assumed the throne himself the assemblage had grown into a full-fledged collegium musicum—essentially a small orchestra.

What Prince Leopold could offer Bach was a professional ensemble of three violinists, a cellist, a double-bassist, two flutists, an oboist, a bassoonist, two trumpeters, a timpanist, an organist, and three singers—and their numbers might be eked out by amateur musicians who held other positions at the court. Many of Bach’s most buoyant instrumental works date from his years at Cöthen, including his Brandenburg Concertos and his violin concertos. The exact dating of these works is often problematic, since most of Bach’s Cöthen manuscripts are lost. The Brandenburg Concertos appeared as a collection of six discrete works, and they were, at least in part, Bach’s arrangements from earlier settings. The collection was assembled as a sort of job application. In 1721 Bach was in his fourth year as Prince Leopold’s musical director, and everything was going more-or-less swimmingly, but in that year the Prince married his cousin, the Princess of Anhalt-Bernburg. She reportedly disliked music, and Bach unquestionably disliked her.

On March 24, 1721, feeling the urgency to get out of Cöthen, Bach inscribed a servile dedication letter in courtly French to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg, whom he had met a couple of years before and who he felt might be interested in hiring him. The letter—and the six concertos that accompanied it—seem never to have been acknowledged, and it is all but certain that the Margrave of Brandenburg never had the works performed. He probably couldn’t have, since they call for the instrumental forces of Anhalt-Cöthen, which surpassed those at the Margrave’s palace in Berlin. Nonetheless, the name Brandenburg became attached to them many years later. Bach would remain in Cöthen until 1723, when he moved to Leipzig, where he would spend the rest of his life. Though each of the six Brandenburg Concertos has a distinct character and employs a different combination of instruments, the set hangs together as a seemingly inevitable cycle.

Perhaps we are simply projecting this characteristic on the Brandenburgs in retrospect; their music was certainly not conceived as a single span, at least at the outset, since some of their movements are simply Bach’s rearrangements of earlier works. In many ways the Brandenburg Concertos stand as a summa of the possibilities of the Baroque concerto grosso, pushing the genre’s boundaries to the outer limit and beyond. The Italianate solo concerto, the classic concerto grosso (pitting a “soloistic” group of players, or concertino, against a background ensemble, called the ripieno or tutti), the orchestral suite, smaller-scale chamber music—all come into play in the course of these six pieces. These concerts shake up our accustomed perception of these thrice-familiar pieces by presenting them not in the order Bach assigned when he drew up his collection in 1721, but rather in a sequence that highlights the differences among them. Here concertos that emphasize the blend of orchestral sections (Nos. 3 and 6) are separated by one that capitalizes on solo virtuosity (No. 2). The Brandenburg Concerto No.

3 in F major (“for three violins, three violas, and three violoncelli, with bass for the harpsichord”), along with the First and the Sixth, can be taken to exemplify the emerging sense of what we recognize in retrospect as an orchestral style, stressing the textures of instrumental sections as they contrast and coalesce. These are concertos in the sense that the word was employed in the Baroque to mean a “coming together” of instruments. Here the instruments that come together are the strings, distributed in a way that departs markedly from Italianate concerto models. Knowing how fascinated Bach was with numerology, we keep our eyes peeled for reflections of that interest in his scores. Is it merely a coincidence that the Concerto No. 3 should be scored for three violins, three violas, three cellos (adding up to three instrumental sections), atop the inevitable continuo bass? The violinists and violists serve as both concertino and ripieno; in tutti sections the three players of each instrument (their ranks may be increased in orchestral performance) perform in unison, as a section, but in the contrasting episodes they go their separate ways as three soloists.

The opening Allegro offers a magnificent example of what might be called “musical choreography,” in which the musical material is tossed from one instrumental group to another. In performance, the listener inevitably becomes a rapt viewer as well, watching the themes pass from violins to violas to cellos like a sonic volleyball. The closing movement, also an Allegro, is a high-spirited fugue that seems to ask the players to push the tempo to the limit. The two Allegros are connected by a musical mystery: a sequence of merely two chords forming an imperfect (or “Phrygian”) cadence. There is little agreement among musicians and musicologists about whether the chords should be played verbatim or whether they should close a movement inserted at the player’s discretion. In many performances today the harpsichordist interpolates a movement here—either an existing movement by Bach from a solo-harpsichord piece or an improvisation of his or her own—with the orchestra joining in to intone the final two chords before everyone leaps into the finale. Sometimes the concertmaster joins the harpsichordist at this spot for a movement from a Bach violin sonata.

Still, it is odd that Bach should have placed a fermata over the second of the chords rather than the first; one could imagine an improvisation taking place above the first chord—i.e., prior to the harmonic resolution—but hardly after it. But the manuscript is clear in this regard and the whole question remains a puzzle without a certain solution. The Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 (for “one trumpet, one flute, one oboe, one violin, all solo, and two violins, one viola and bass in the orchestra, with violoncello and bass for the harpsichord”) is the first of the set’s three concertos that exploit instrumental virtuosity. The piece calls for a solo group (the concertino) that interweaves against a background texture of strings and harpsichord (the ripieno). The natural trumpet of Bach’s time played at a generally higher pitch than standard modern trumpets do, yielding the unusual disposition of four solo instruments that operate in roughly the same register. This affords the composer opportunities to develop his material in close counterpoint while relying on the instruments’ distinct timbres to keep their various lines clearly defined.

The strong rhythmic articulation of the opening Allegro yields to a more sinuous Andante in which the texture is reduced; and the concerto concludes with the entire ensemble offering a textbook four-part fugue that shows how much fun a good textbook can be. After such a high-wire act, the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 (for “two violas, two violas da gamba, violoncello, bass, and harpsichord”) comes as a richly stuffed cushion, abjuring as it does hard edges and sonic brilliance in favor of an overall sense of enveloping luxury. Like the Third Brandenburg Concerto, this is a work for strings, though for an unusual combination of them. Violins are banished, leaving the top lines to a pair of warm-toned violas. Two violas da gamba fill in the middle ground of the texture, and a continuo group of harpsichord and some combination of low strings (bowed or plucked) handles the bottom part. The opening movement stands as a masterful display of contrapuntal skill in which Bach keeps his violists scurrying after one another in close canon.

Even within this dense texture, solo instruments break out as a momentary concertino, usually as a group of two violas and cello. In the second movement Bach reduces the ensemble to a trio sonata for two violas and continuo, on which he bestows music of timeless, profound consolation. A rondo finale intersperses contrasting episodes among four statements of a buoyant, gigue-like ritornello. The movement’s structure, however, is more subtle than that suggests since the third interpolated episode mirrors the first. That yields an overall structure for the movement of A-B-A-C-A-B-A, a grand musical palindrome that brings the proceedings back to their beginning. —James M.

Keller More About the Music Recordings: A DVD with Gottfried von der Göltz directing the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra in the Castle of Cöthen, where Bach worked when he wrote these pieces (though they were apparently not performed there when they were new) (Euroarts) | Harpsichordist Trevor Pinnock directing the English Concert (Deutsche Grammophon) | Rinaldo Alessandrini directing the Concerto Italiano (Naïve) | Giovanni Antonini and Il Giardino Armonico (Teldec) | Jeanne Lamon leading Tafelmusik (Sony Classical Vivarte) Reading: Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, by Christoph Wolff (Norton) | J.S. Bach, edited by Malcolm Boyd (Oxford Composer Companions series, Oxford) | Bach, by Boyd (Schirmer) | The Cambridge Companion to Bach, edited by John Butt (Cambridge) | The Social and Religious Designs of J.S.

Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, by Michael Marissen (Princeton) San Francisco Symphony BBC - GCSE Bitesize: The concerto in the Baroque period (roughly 1600-1750) A concerto is a large-scale composition for an orchestra plus a soloist or a group of soloists. The soloist(s) alternate playing with or alongside the larger ensemble to provide opposition and contrast. Concertos have three movements – fast, slow, fast. The concerto in the Baroque period (roughly 1600-1750) Baroque composers who wrote concertos include Vivaldi (who wrote over 500, around half of them for violin), Bach and Handel. Antonio Lucio Vivaldi There were two types of Baroque concerto - the concerto grosso and the solo concerto. The concerto grosso: is written for a group of solo instruments (the concertino) plus a larger ensemble (the ripieno) Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos are well-known examples of the Baroque concerto grosso. Listen to the opening of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4.

The solo group of violin and two flutes are prominent at the beginning and are then joined by the ripieno strings. Listen for the harpsichord playing the continuo. The Baroque solo concerto:: is written for one solo instrument plus orchestra often has brilliant and technically demanding passages for the soloist to play Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is a well-known example of the Baroque solo violin concerto Listen to this extract from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Notice the contrast between solo violin and ripieno passages. Page: Milestones of the Millennium: Bach's "Brandenburg" Concertos Johann Sebastian Bach's "Brandenburg" Concertos with Lisa Simeone Few musical works are as loved--and as often performed--as the six "Brandenburg" Concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach. These six works display a lighter side of Bach's imperishable genius. Yet they came into being as an unexpected gift. That's what happened in 1721 when Bach presented the Margrave of Brandenburg with a bound manuscript containing six lively concertos for chamber orchestra, works based on an Italian Concerto Grosso style. The Margrave never thanked Bach for his work--or paid him.

There's no way he could have known that this gift--later named the Brandenburg Concertos--would become a benchmark of Baroque music and still have the power to move people almost three centuries later. On this edition of Performance Today's Milestones of the Millennium, we explore how Bach's genius opened up a vivid new world of music for chamber orchestra. The Brandenburg Concertos are a highlight of one of the happiest and most productive periods in Bach's life. At the time he wrote them, Bach was the Kapellmeister--the music director--in the small town of Coethen, where he was composing music for the court. Since the Margrave of Brandenburg seems to have ignored Bach's gift of concertos, it's likely that Bach himself presided over the first performances at home in Coethen. They didn't have a name then; that didn't come until 150 years later, when Bach's biographer Philipp Spitta called them "Brandenburg" Concertos for the very first time, and the name stuck. Even though he didn't call them the "Brandenburgs," Bach still thought of them as a set.

What he did was compile them from short instrumental sinfonias and concerto movements he had already written. Then he re-worked the old music, often re-writing and elaborating where he saw fit. In doing so, Bach created something of a dramatic arc from the brilliant first concerto to the last, which evokes a spirited chase. Each of the six concertos requires a different combination of instruments as well as some highly skilled soloists. The Margrave had his own small court orchestra in Berlin, but it was a group of mostly mediocre players. All the evidence suggests that these virtuosic Brandenburg concertos perfectly matched the talents of the musicians on hand in Coethen. So how did a provincial town get so many excellent musicians? Just before Johann Sebastian arrived in Coethen in 1717, a new king inherited the throne in Prussia. Friedrich Wilhelm I became known as the "Soldier King" because he was interested in the military strength of his kingdom, not in refined artistic pursuits. One of his first royal acts was to disband the prestigious Berlin court orchestra.

That threw many musicians out of work, and as luck would have it, seven of the best ones were snatched up to work in Coethen by its music-loving Prince Leopold. That's why Bach found such a rich music scene when he started to work there. It gave him the luxury of writing for virtuosos and they let him push the boundraries of his creativity. Concerto No. 2, for example, has the trumpeter play high flourishes. No. 4 allows the solo violin to soar. When Bach played chamber music, he usually took the viola part so he could sit--as he wrote in a letter--"in the middle of the harmony." But for the Concerto No. 5 he had a real inspiration. He switched to harpsichord, gave it a knock-out part and, in the process, invented the modern keyboard concerto. The writing is so advanced and so intricate for its time that scholars assume the Fifth Concerto is actually the last Brandenburg Concerto Bach wrote. If the dazzling writing style of the Fifth Concerto points to a late composition date, the Sixth Concerto probably came first in chronological order.

It's got a simple part for the viola da gamba, a forerunner of the cello, which Bach probably put there for his employer, Prince Leopold, to play. The Prince was wealthy man and a serious music lover but probably a performer of only modest talent. The Sixth is also unique in the set because Bach omitted the violins from the ensemble; the violas take the highest string part. All six Brandenburg Concertos reveal the ebullient side of Bach, and they're one of the most welcome gifts he left us. Hear Performance Today host Lisa Simeone explore the world of Bach's six Brandenburg Concertos and their lasting influence on chamber music and the solo concerto. Another Milestones of the Millenium online feature. (This audio segment requires the free RealPlayer 5.0 or higher. You can also listen with a 14.4 connection) Brandenburg Concertos | compositions by Bach | Britannica.com compositions by Bach concerto grosso Brandenburg Concertos, six concerti grossi by Johann Sebastian Bach , considered masterful examples of balance between assorted groups of soloists and a small orchestra.

The collection was composed circa 1711–20 and dedicated in 1721 to Christian Ludwig, the margrave ( marquess ) of Brandenburg and the younger brother of King Frederick I of Prussia. About 1719, when Bach traveled to Berlin to order a new harpsichord , he performed for Christian Ludwig, who was quite impressed and soon commissioned several works. Two years passed, however, before Bach delivered the so-called Brandenburg Concertos. Such royal requests could be quite lucrative for a composer, but the margrave never paid for Bach’s work, for reasons that remain unclear. It may be that Christian Ludwig knew the pieces were neither newly created nor written specifically for him; rather, they were revisions of works Bach had composed some years earlier for the court at Köthen. Johann Sebastian Bach, oil on canvas by Elias Gottlieb (Gottlob) Haussmann, 1746; in the … © Photos.com/Jupiterimages The Brandenburg Concertos represent a popular music genre of the Baroque era—the concerto grosso—in which a group of soloists plays together with a small orchestra.

The word grosso simply means “large,” for there are more soloists than was customary at the time, and the music tends to be more expansive. In the case of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, the soloists are so numerous that the work is virtually symphonic. At various points in the composition , Bach crafted solo roles for one violin , three oboes , one bassoon , and two horns —nearly as many musicians as might constitute a small orchestra. The second concerto of the set has a perilously high trumpet solo as well as solos for recorder (or flute ), oboe, and violin. Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 features three each of violins, violas , and cellos . Soloists in the fourth concerto include two flutes and a violin and in the fifth a flute, a violin, and a harpsichord. Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, the only piece in the collection to include no violins whatsoever, spotlights the lower strings, supplemented, as always, by the harpsichord. Similar Topics San Francisco Symphony - BACH: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 San Francisco Symphony Bach, J.S.: Brandenburg Concerto No.

3 Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major, BWV 1048 Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Thuringia, on March 21, 1685, and died in Leipzig, Saxony, on July 28, 1750. He wrote the six Brandenburg concertos not later than March 1721, probably at Cöthen. At their first performances, he presumably played the harpsichord solo in No. 5 and violin or viola in the others. The San Francisco Symphony first played No. 3 in February 1914 under Henry Hadley's direction. It was played here most recently in May 2012, with Jane Glover leading. All instrumentations listed in the program note are translated from Bach's autograph. Performance time: about twelve minutes. Bach was thirty-two when he assumed the position of Capellmeister at the Court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt in Cöthen, in December 1717. It was a big decision for the composer, who already had a perfectly good job as orchestra leader for the Duke of Weimar, where he had worked since 1708.

The Duke refused to accept Bach’s resignation and had him held under arrest for a month before he finally relented and let his orchestra leader go. But the allures of Cöthen were substantial. Leopold’s passion for music was boundless. He was himself a reasonably accomplished performer on the viola da gamba and, to a lesser extent, as a violinist and harpsichordist. As a teenager the Prince had convinced his mother to start hiring a musical staff with whom he could play chamber music when he was at home in Cöthen, and by the time he assumed the throne himself the assemblage had grown into a full-fledged collegium musicum—essentially a small orchestra. What Prince Leopold could offer Bach was a professional ensemble of three violinists, a cellist, a double-bassist, two flutists, an oboist, a bassoonist, two trumpeters, a timpanist, an organist, and three singers—and their numbers might be eked out by amateur musicians who held other positions at the court. Many of Bach’s most buoyant instrumental works date from his years at Cöthen, including his Brandenburg Concertos and his violin concertos.

The exact dating of these works is often problematic, since most of Bach’s Cöthen manuscripts are lost. The Brandenburg Concertos appeared as a collection of six discrete works, and they were, at least in part, Bach’s arrangements from earlier settings. The collection was assembled as a sort of job application. In 1721 Bach was in his fourth year as Prince Leopold’s musical director, and everything was going more-or-less swimmingly, but in that year the Prince married his cousin, the Princess of Anhalt-Bernburg. She reportedly disliked music, and Bach unquestionably disliked her. On March 24, 1721, feeling the urgency to get out of Cöthen, Bach inscribed a servile dedication letter in courtly French to Margrave Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg, whom he had met a couple of years before and who he felt might be interested in hiring him. The letter—and the six concertos that accompanied it—seem never to have been acknowledged, and it is all but certain that the Margrave of Brandenburg never had the works performed.

He probably couldn’t have, since they call for the instrumental forces of Anhalt-Cöthen, which surpassed those at the Margrave’s palace in Berlin. Nonetheless, the name Brandenburg became attached to them many years later. Bach would remain in Cöthen until 1723, when he moved to Leipzig, where he would spend the rest of his life. Though each of the six Brandenburg Concertos has a distinct character and employs a different combination of instruments, the set hangs together as a seemingly inevitable cycle. Perhaps we are simply projecting this characteristic on the Brandenburgs in retrospect; their music was certainly not conceived as a single span, at least at the outset, since some of their movements are simply Bach’s rearrangements of earlier works. In many ways the Brandenburg Concertos stand as a summa of the possibilities of the Baroque concerto grosso, pushing the genre’s boundaries to the outer limit and beyond.

The Italianate solo concerto, the classic concerto grosso (pitting a “soloistic” group of players, or concertino,against a background ensemble, called the ripieno or tutti), the orchestral suite, smaller-scale chamber music—all come into play in the course of these six pieces. The Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major (“for three violins, three violas, and three violoncelli, with bass for the harpsichord”), along with the First and the Sixth, can be taken to exemplify the emerging sense of what we recognize in retrospect as an orchestral style, stressing the textures of instrumental sections as they contrast and coalesce. These are concertos in the sense that the word was employed in the Baroque to mean a “coming together” of instruments. Here the instruments that come together are the strings, distributed in a way that departs markedly from Italianate concerto models. Knowing how fascinated Bach was with numerology, we keep our eyes peeled for reflections of that interest in his scores. Is it merely a coincidence that the Concerto No.

3 should be scored for three violins, three violas, three cellos (adding up to three instrumental sections), atop the inevitable continuo bass? The violinists and violists serve as both concertino and ripieno; in tutti sections the three players of each instrument (their ranks may be increased in orchestral performance) perform in unison, as a section, but in the contrasting episodes they go their separate ways as three soloists. The opening Allegro offers a magnificent example of what might be called “musical choreography,” in which the musical material is tossed from one instrumental group to another. In performance, the listener inevitably becomes a rapt viewer as well, watching the themes pass from violins to violas to cellos like a sonic volleyball. The closing movement, also an Allegro, is a high-spirited fugue that seems to ask the players to push the tempo to the limit. The two Allegros are connected by a musical mystery: a sequence of merely two chords forming an imperfect (or “Phrygian”) cadence. There is little agreement among musicians and musicologists about whether the chords should be played verbatim or whether they should close a movement inserted at the player’s discretion.

In many performances today the harpsichordist interpolates a movement here—either an existing movement by Bach from a solo-harpsichord piece or an improvisation of his or her own—with the orchestra joining in to intone the final two chords before everyone leaps into the finale. Sometimes the concertmaster joins the harpsichordist at this spot for a movement from a Bach violin sonata. Still, it is odd that Bach should have placed a fermata over the second of the chords rather than the first; one could imagine an improvisation taking place above the first chord—i.e., prior to the harmonic resolution—but hardly after it. But the manuscript is clear in this regard and the whole question remains a puzzle without a certain solution. —James M.

Keller More About the Music Recordings: A DVD with Gottfried von der Göltz directing the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra in the Castle of Cöthen, where Bach worked when he wrote these pieces (Euroarts) | Harpsichordist Trevor Pinnock directing the English Concert (Deutsche Grammophon) | Rinaldo Alessandrini directing the Concerto Italiano (Naïve) | Jeanne Lamon leading Tafelmusik (Sony Classical Vivarte) Reading: Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician, by Christoph Wolff (Norton) | J.S. Bach, edited by Malcolm Boyd (Oxford Composer Companions series, Oxford) | Bach, by Boyd (Schirmer) | The Cambridge Companion to Bach, edited by John Butt (Cambridge) | The Social and Religious Designs of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos, by Michael Marissen (Princeton) San Francisco Symphony

Question: Which composer wrote the ‘Brandenburg Concertos’?
Answer: Johann Sebastian Bach