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About the Music.

At A Glance

Leonidas Kavakos and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s present us with an afternoon of music both familiar and new from Johann Sebastian Bach. The violin concertos in A minor and E Major are well-loved staples of the Baroque repertoire. But this concert closes with a stunning surprise: a restoration of the harpsichord concerto in D minor into the lost score of an earlier violin concerto using the same music and key. Longer and more virtuosic than the A-minor and E-Major concertos, it shows off Bach’s daring expansion of the standard Baroque concerto practices he’d inherited from Vivaldi.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH

(1685–1750)

Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor, BWV 1041

About the Composer

In an era when musicians were mere servants either of the church or a princely court, J. S. Bach was an early example of a successful musical entrepreneur whose ambition and talent allowed him to jump rapidly from one post to another in the pursuit of higher earnings and greater artistic challenges. In 1717, he made a bold career move — so bold, in fact, that it landed him in jail. For nine years, he had been music director at the ducal court at Weimar and during that time had become one of the most admired organists and composers of organ music in central Europe. But the small princely court at Cöthen deeply attracted him. Prince Leopold was a cultivated ruler who sang well and played several instruments; as Bach described him, he “not only loved but knew music.” He had an accomplished court orchestra of 17 players, and he was willing to pay considerably more than Weimar for Bach’s services. Since Bach had a rapidly growing family (he was eventually to sire 20 children), the generous salary was a strong inducement. On the negative side of the scale was the fact that Cöthen practiced the Calvinist faith, which preached liturgical austerity and reduced music for religious services largely to unaccompanied hymns; Bach would therefore have little opportunity to continue his artistry at the organ. But he would have new challenges of creating a rich secular repertoire for Cöthen's instrumentalists.

All things considered, Bach decided to accept the post at Cöthen. But he had not reckoned on one important detail: the Duke of Weimar refused to release him from his post. When Bach persisted in making plans for his transfer to Cöthen, the Duke threw his stiff-necked employee in prison. But the jail term lasted for only a month before Duke Ernst August finally relented and gave the composer a “dishonorable discharge.”

Bach flourished at Cöthen. Inspired by the Italian masters Vivaldi, Corelli, and Torelli, he created many concertos for solo instruments and combinations of instruments, but because these were considered to be one-performance pieces, to be quickly replaced by newer ones, only a few of these have come down to us. Their beauty and craft