Italian Concerto in F major BWV 971

For J.S. Bach there was nothing anomalous about writing a concerto for a single keyboard instrument without orchestra. During his time as organist and Konzertmeister at the Court of Weimar he had made solo keyboard arrangements of no fewer than sixteen concertos in the Italian style – most of them Violin Concertos by Vivaldi – and when he published Part 2 of the Clavierübung in 1735 it was quite natural that he should include a solo concerto conceived in much the same style but based on material of his own. The brilliance of the outer movements and the elegantly expressive line of the central Andante have made what Bach called his “concerto in the Italian taste” one of the most popular of all his keyboard works.

The instrument the composer had in mind was a two-manual harpsichord, on which it is relatively easy to secure a contrast in sound equivalent to that between tutti and solo passages in an orchestral concerto. It is not quite so straightforward for a pianist, who doesn’t have such clearly distinctive means at his disposal. But if the difference between tutti and solo becomes uncertain it is not out of keeping with the nature of the music itself. In the first movement – which is clearly an Allegro, incidentally, although there is no tempo direction in the score – Bach begins by making a firm distinction between an emphatic orchestral kind of sound in the opening bars and the first solo episode, where a single line in the right hand runs over repeated quavers in the left. But as the movement goes on he allows it to develop more freely of such considerations and restores the textural distinction only with the last return of the opening material.

There is no problem in the slow movement, which is an exclusively solo invention consisting of a melodic line drawn through elaborate decorations in the Venetian style over an unchanging rhythm in an unambitious left hand. The imaginary orchestra is back in place at the beginning of the final Presto where its brightly sonorous material is always easily distinguishable from the linear flexibility of the two-part solo episodes.