JS Bach: Harpsichord Concertos, BWV 1052, 1054, 1055 & 1058

Album review

J.S. Bach is often thought of as a conservative, but in one respect, he was anything but; his seven harpsichord concertos were the first instances of the keyboard concerto genre that has come down to the present day. Unlike with the Brandenburg Concertos, Bach's other great monuments in the concerto genre, there is considerable uncertainty about where, when, and for whom they were written. Harpsichordist Andrew Arthur, leading the Hanover Band historical performance ensemble, accepts a hypothesis that they were composed for use by the Leipzig Collegium Musicum, that they were essentially coffee house music to be performed by a small group. Accordingly, the Hanover Band offers a performance with one player per part, and Arthur doubling as a continuo player and as soloist. For some listeners, this may be a state-of-the-art performance of Bach's keyboard concertos. For others, it won't work so well. For one thing, the Collegium Musicum theory is a matter of debate. The Brandenburg Concertos were written for a court setting with a larger orchestra and emulated Italian models that were for quite large groups, and it may be that these concertos were written for the Dresden court or another noble establishment. Even if the Collegium Musicum idea is accepted, Signum Classics' church sound is far from what would have been heard at Bach's Café Zimmermann in its small rooms fronting on the Katharinenstraße. Arthur does not draw a sharp differentiation between the harpsichord's continuo and solo roles, and the sound environment tends to swallow up the instruments. Nor is it certain that a harpsichord would have been the intended continuo instrument in a performance of this kind. Arthur seems to have been trying to create a bumptious, rhythmic sound that would have been appropriate in that setting, but the end result is an undifferentiated mass of sound, swimming in a church acoustic, that doesn't comport at all with the aims of the concerto genre. Whether it is the engineering or the conception that is at fault here may be debated; most likely, it is a combination of both.

© James Manheim /TiVo