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The First Organ Concertos RECONSTRUCTIONS of WORKS by G The First Organ Concertos RECONSTRUCTIONS OF WORKS BY G. F. HANDEL & J. S. BACH MATTHEW DIRST , ORGAN | ARS LYRICA Houston The First Organ Concertos MATTHEW DIRST, ORGAN RECONSTRUCTIONS OF WORKS BY G. F. HANDEL & J. S. BACH Members of ARS LYRICA HOUSTON Concerto in D Major George Frideric Handel Concerto in G minor, BWV 1058 (R) J. S. Bach from Il Trinofo del Tempo e del Disinganno (1707) (1685-1759) 7 | [Allegro] 4:00 1 | Sonata 2:51 8 | Andante 5:24 2 | Adagio 1:17 9 | Allegro assai 4:19 3 | [Allegro] 1:27 Concerto in D Major BWV 1053 (R) J. S. Bach Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052 (R )Johann Sebastian Bach 10 | [Allegro] 8:28 4 | [Allegro] (1685-1750) 8:11 11 | [Siciliano] 5;35 5 | Adagio 5:53 12 | [Vivace] 7:20 6 | Allegro 8:02 Total: 62:49 Dresden, 1726 2 ABOUT THE MUSIC etween 1707 and 1725, concerted movements featuring the organ coalesced into nascent keyboard concertos, thanks principally to George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, and Johann Sebastian Bach. An interior movement from Handel’s 1707 Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno is the earliest such work, though it is not exactly a keyboard concerto: this single movement features obbligato organ alongside a few other instruments with brief solo lines. In 1713 Johann Mattheson noted that in such a work “each part in turn comes to prominence and vies, as it were, with the other parts.” Antonio Vivaldi also composed several concertos of the same general variety, in which the organ is merely one of several solo colors. But in contrast to Handel’s example, the solo writing in Vivaldi’s chamber concertos is quite simple; these are works for seemingly interchangeable instruments and most survive in alternate scorings without organ. Ultimately more significant for the development of the keyboard concerto were the violin concertos in Vivaldi’s L’estro armonico (1711), from which Bach made his own transcriptions for either solo harpsichord or organ. These transcriptions show a serious, in-depth engagement with Vivaldi’s dynamic and eminently plastic ritornello procedure. Its effect on Bach’s compositional thinking is obvious in the Fifth “Brandenburg” Concerto, which was likely motivated by a 1719 trip to Berlin to pick up a new Mietke harpsichord for the Cöthen court. But a concerto in D minor, which we know principally in its harpsichord solo version from c1738–39 (BWV 1052), was probably his first keyboard concerto, and may have been initially intended for the organ. In September of 1725 an anonymous writer for a Hamburg newspaper reported on Bach’s visit to the Saxon court in Dresden, where he played a couple of recitals on the new Silbermann organ in St. Sophia’s Church. Bach’s repertoire for these programs included “preludes and various concertos, with accompanying soft instrumental music in all keys.” What concertos did he play? None of his own cantata sinfonias with obbligato organ had yet been composed or arranged. Recent studies propose that Bach performed an early version of his D-minor harpsichord concerto (BWV 1052) and a sequence of movements that he later reworked as a Johann Sebastian Bach 3 harpsichord concerto in E Major (BWV 1053). In addition, this recording offers one other possible Bach organ concerto, as reconstructed from the G-minor harpsichord George Frideric Handel concerto (BWV 1058). The more familiar version of the latter work, for violin solo in A minor (BWV 1041), survives thanks to a set of autograph parts whose transposition errors suggest an even earlier (lost) keyboard Vorlage in G minor. This recording, then, reconstructs what Bach’s Dresden audience might have heard: three organ concertos in the Vivaldian fast-slow-fast format, with the kind of ensemble suggested in the account cited above. A single Handel concerto, also comprising three movements, provides a kind of historical introduction to the three Bach concertos, which are presented in their likely chronological order. The Handel concerto, drawn from his Roman oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno , includes an interior “Sonata” (the most extensive of two organ obbligatos in the work) plus rescorings of the second and third sections of the oratorio’s opening “Sonata del Overtura.” The interior sonata appears at a crucial moment in this morality tale, as Piacere (Pleasure) tempts Bellezza (Beauty) with a range of worldly delights. Cardinal Benedetto Pamphilj’s libretto describes Piacere’s pleasure garden as a magical place, where miraculous concerted music emanates from an unexpected source: the organ. Handel’s busy fingers must have caused a stir, at least momentarily. But the sonata ends with Bellezza interrupting its final cadence and rejecting its virtuosity as sensuous vanity. Adding his own gloss here to Pamphilj’s story, il caro Sassone turned the mirror on himself: his extravagant Sonata is but a temporary diversion in Bellezza’s slow journey toward Truth. Bach’s first concerted work for organ with instruments is equally provocative, but in a characteristically Bachian way. In his D-minor concerto Bach tries to out- do Vivaldi, with outer movements premised on motoric, driving ritornelli and extensive virtuosic solo passages full of bariolage , quick figuration, and extremes of range. Its unison opening ritornello has often been compared to Vivaldi’s Op. 7, No. 11 “Grosso Mogul” concerto, which Bach transcribed sometime after 1713 for organ (BWV 594). Its old-fashioned slow movement, with its unison ostinato-like framing ritornello, likewise suggests a Weimar origin ( c1714–17) for the whole work. Usefully, the earliest layer of the D-minor concerto, as preserved in a complete set of parts copied by C. P. E. Bach sometime in the early 1730s (BWV 1052a), provides a model for reconstructing an organ concerto. Because of their likely chronological primacy, Emanuel Bach’s parts serve as the basis for this recording, except in places where later versions of the same music give stronger definition to phrase shapes, improve voice leading, or solve balance issues. C. P. E. Bach’s version of this concerto lacks the oboes that Sebastian Bach introduced when he reused its movements in cantatas featuring organ obbligato during the late 1720s (BWV 146/1-2 and BWV 188/1, respectively). By contrast, the final and best-known version of this work, from the c1738–39 autograph of 4 the harpsichord concerti, returns to the scoring of its (lost) parent concerto: keyboard plus four-part strings. Our reconstructions therefore restore the likely orchestration of Bach’s Dresden organ concertos: organ plus four string players and continuo, which is also more in keeping with the report of “accompanying soft instrumental music.” Oboe parts for the outer movements of the Handel concerto, on the other hand, are crucial to the scoring of this work. The G-minor concerto is probably next in line chronologically, given the more integrated and leisurely ritornellos in its outer movements. In comparison with the D-minor concerto, an idiomatic musical text for a G-minor organ concerto is somewhat easier to construct, since there are but two extant sources for this work: one for violin (BWV 1041 in A minor) and the other for harpsichord (BWV 1058 in G minor). The latter source requires only a bit of pruning in the keyboard solo part to make a very effective organ concerto. In comparison to the previous two works, the D-Major concerto is decidedly more modern in style, in the manner of Bach’s six organ trio sonatas, which he composed between 1725 and 1730. The D-major concerto shares several key features with the trio sonatas; their common musical language mixes galant gestures, ritornello procedure, and da capo form. As it stands in the later collection of harpsichord concertos, the related E-Major concerto (BWV 1053) comprises two large ritornello/ da capo -format movements and an interior siciliano with a framing ritornello. Corresponding cantata movements from the third Leipzig Jahrgang include two cantata sinfonias (BWV 169/1 and BWV 49/1) and an aria with both voice and organ obbligatos (BWV 169/5). Except for the excised oboe parts, our reconstruction of a Dresden D-Major organ concerto favors the musical text of the 1726 cantata movements, whose solo and accompanying parts (like BWV 1052a and its complex of related cantata movements) are somewhat less elaborate than the eventual harpsichord concerto. Handel’s more thoroughgoing pursuit of the organ concerto in the 1730s and beyond, when they served as entr’actes for his English oratorios, stands in contrast to Bach’s adaptation of the genre during the same decade for Leipzig Collegium Musicum concerts, for which harpsichord was the preferred solo vehicle. Until quite recently, all the Bach harpsichord concertos were thought to be transcriptions of violin or oboe concertos, which (to follow this line of thought) Bach rearranged first as cantata sinfonias with obbligato organ during the late 1720s. But a new consensus about the early history of Bach’s concerted keyboard works has altered that narrative. The earliest examples of this subgenre, it seems, were either onetime opportunities (Handel never reused his 1707 “Sonata”) or they remained open applications, ready for transformation from one context to another, as Bach so persuasively demonstrates. Matthew Dirst 5 ABOUT THE ORGAN esigned and built by Paul Fritts & Company of Tacoma, Washington for St. Philip Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas, this instrument was installed in the Dnewly renovated St. Philip sanctuary in early 2010. Its case design, in keeping with the spare nature of the building’s architecture, is original and incorporates ideas found in several revered historic organ cases. The treble flats curve inward and alternate direction in ancient Dutch fashion, and the proportions of the bass and tenor flats follow well-established trends.
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