Bach Collegium Japan & Masato Suzuki

Concertos for Harpsichord Vol.1 Bach Collegium Japan & Masato Suzuki

The extant concertos by Johann Sebastian Bach for one harpsichord and strings were all composed before 1738, which makes them some of the first, if not the first keyboard concertos - a genre destined to become one of the most popular within classical music. In all likelihood Bach wrote them for his own use (or that of his talented sons) - probably to be performed with Leipzig's Collegium Musicum of which he had taken over as director in 1729. The fresh and exuberant character one finds in the concertos seems to reflect how much Bach enjoyed the opportunity to engage with his fellow musicians. But much of the music itself was in fact not new - despite how idiomatic they may sound, many of Bach's harpsichord concertos are almost certainly transcriptions of earlier works written for other instruments. Some of these original works are no longer extant, but it is nevertheless possible to trace the ancestry of BWV 1052 and the outer movements of BWV 1056 to lost violin concertos, while BWV 1053 is a reworking of three cantata movements which in turn probably hailed from a lost organ concerto.