Concerto in D minor, BWV 974

after Alessandro Marcello (1669-1750)

first movement without tempo heading

Adagio

Presto

A major influence in arousing Bach’s interest in the Italian style was Johann Ernst of Sachsen-Weimar, the younger of the two princes at the court where Bach was employed as organist between 1708 and 1717. Johann Ernst was himself a talented composer of concertos in the Italian style and it might well have been at his suggestion that Bach undertook the twenty concerto transcriptions he is known to have made at this time. Certainly, although most of the concerto sources of Bach solo arrangements are by Vivaldi and other Venetian composers, three of them are by Johann Ernst of Sachsen-Weimar.

Long thought to be by Vivaldi and then attributed to Benedetto Marcello, the original version of the Concerto in D minor is an Oboe Concerto in the same key by Benedetto’s younger and less prolific brother Alessandro. If Bach learned anything from the first movement it was to avoid the foreshortened structure which apparently - he was actually working from a faulty copy with six bars missing - obscures Marcello’s formal strategy at a crucial point towards the end. He would also avoid in his harpsichord music the repeated notes with which Marcello’s strings introduce and accompany the oboe in the Adagio and which are reproduced here more or less as they are in the original. The melodic decoration, on the other hand, is an exquisite study in the art of compensating for the difficulty in sustaining a line on the harpsichord. The most interesting part of the work, as far as Bach’s development is concerned, is the brilliantly articulated and perfectly shaped Presto finale.