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Programme notes: JS Bach Brandenburg Concerto no. 3

J.S. BACH 1685 - 1750

Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G (BMV 1048)

  1. Allegro
  2. Adagio
  3. Allegro

 

The six Brandenburg Concertos were written while Bach was in the service of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, although they were not composed for that patron, but for the Margrave of Brandenburg, whom Bach had met in Berlin in 1719 whilst buying a new harpsichord (probably the one used for the first performance of the fifth concerto). The Margrave did not, however, seem particularly impressed with these six masterpieces when Bach sent them to him, complete with a famous dedication in French, in 1721. Indeed, it is doubtful if they were ever performed at all by their princely recipient, and on the Margrave's death they were sold off for a pittance.
 
Although not really conceived as a group, the six works seem to have been brought together to demonstrate different ways of writing "concertos for several instruments" as the authograph title page calls them. By using different combinations of instruments, Bach deliberately set himself in each work a different problem of instrumental sonority and texture, to the solution of which he brought all his skill and creative powers.
 
Concerto no. 3 dispenses with wind instruments altogether, but is far from simply being an exercise in the contrast between 'concertino' and 'ripieno'. Bach divides the string band into groups of three; violins, violas, and cellos, together with bass and continuo, and the use of these groups is infinitely varied, with different combinations of soloists mingling freely with the tuttis. The bubbling last movement is also unusual; a binary dance form whose second section is three times as long as the first.
 
There is no written slow movement, but the two adagio chords on the dominant of E minor which separate the two outer movements suggest that Bach envisaged that an improvised movement ending on the two cadence chords should be interposed, either by a group of players or more probably an individual soloist.

 

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