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Today is the day that I celebrate as J. S. Bach's birthday; it is the day entered in the Baptismal Registry in the town church in which he was born (Eisenach, in Saxony). [Added later: it was yesterday, sorry! March 21st, the first day of Spring, according to Katie.] That same day was given different dates in different parts of the world, due to non-uniformity of calendar usage, and we would have considered it sometime in July, based on the time of year, and the angle of the sun. But that doesn't matter; I still celebrate March 21 of every year as Johann Sebastian Bach's birthday, and it makes me happy to do so. [I explain how March 21st happened to be so late in the summer in an earlier post.]
Oh, what wonderful pieces there are in this collection! Think carefully about the consequences of establishing a financial relationship with Amazon; this 99 cents will be the first 99 of many cents you will inevitably spend on Amazon purchases. (If I had never discovered this website, I would be a richer man today.) Still, this is one way of getting some really awesome music, which you could simply delete if it gets underfoot.
The first one I listened to is Dominus Deus, from the B minor mass. Gorgeous! (The link is to the teaser on Amazon.)
Next, the Concerto for 3 harpsichords. There is a reconstruction for three violins (possibly not included in this set); it is believed that Bach wrote a number of multi-instrument concertos in his youth, which he later re-wrote as keyboard concertos, because his sons were keyboardists. Bach himself was an all-rounder; we know he played viola, and very likely, viola da gamba, and, of course, the organ. Only the re-written keyboard concertos have survived.
If you happen to see a version of this concerto (BWV 1063) for flute, violin and oboe, snap it up; it is delightful! The contrast between the three instruments is fascinating.
The last movement from the Italian Concerto (just a solo piece for harpsichord) is a fast piece that is a wonderful, mad rush from beginning to end, but it builds the rhetoric of the music systematically, so that the delight of the listener simply cannot be held back. Andras Schiff plays this at a very reasonable speed (though it is marked Presto: very fast).
The famous French Suite in G has this rollicking jig as its last movement. It could make anyone want to dance.
Bach's grand Orchestral Suites (called Overtures in his time) were glorious responses to the music of Versailles. The second suite features the flute as a solo instrument; here's a clip from the Rondeau.
At one time, the most famous of Bach's works were the Brandenburg Concertos, written for the Duke of Brandenburg (Brandenburg is a small town near Berlin). It was a set of six concertos; apparently every composer composed a set of six concertos, which he gifted to some noble. The Concerto no. 5 is famous even among these, and was mentioned in the novel Love Story, which was a best seller in the seventies. It was subsequently made into a hit movie starring Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neil. This concerto established the harpsichord --which had up to this point been merely a background instrument-- as a solo instrument. All the other keyboard concertos we know now came after.
The famous Ave Maria (well, one of the famous Ave Marias) is a melody by Charles Gounod sung over a Prelude by Bach. (I read somewhere that it was a common exercise for students to write a melody over the Bach Prelude, so there must be other such pairings out there that nobody has ever heard). Here the melody is played on the violin.
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