Bach: Brandenburg Concertos (Johann Sebastian Bach)

Album review

Even the buyer of the physical CD, to say nothing of online sources, has to be very sharp-eyed to understand what he or she is getting here; it's not quite the usual Brandenburg Concertos that Bach copied out into an elegant manuscript and presented to the Margrave of Brandenburg, but alternate versions, earlier versions in two cases, and an adaptation for harpsichord and orchestra in a third. Truth in packaging would have been desirable. These versions apparently all stem from Bach himself, and as such, they're plenty interesting. It's not known exactly when the concertos were written, or for what occasions Bach might have composed these alternate versions, but they show the iron rule of polyphonic structure in Bach's music over and above its specific instrumental settings. Indeed, as the members of the historical-instrument Apollo Ensemble point out, these versions, with the exception of the harpsichord concerto version of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 4, are sparser than the final ones and seem to present that structure more clearly. The realizations here, however, are less than ideal. The Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, BWV 1047a, is shorn of its string ripieno group, leaving an ensemble that reflects one of the irregular small groupings of Telemann's chamber pieces, intriguing in that Bach rarely wrote for such a group elsewhere, but the balance among the instruments, whether due to the playing or to imperfect engineering, is off, and David Rabinovich's violin is barely audible. In general, the sound, from a church in the Dutch city of Deventer, is murky and mixed up in large spaces, which is wrong for the chamber qualities of this music. With the exception of the Keyboard Concerto in F major, BWV 1057, these works haven't often been recorded, and the album may be useful to serious students of Bach's music. General buyers, however, should ascertain whether they have a definite interest.
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