BACH: CONCERTO FOR VIOLIN AND OBOE, BWV 1060

Excerpted from the Bach by Candlelight Concert at Trinity Cathedral program notes dated November 21, 2014

---

While serving at the Weimar court (1708-1717), Bach gained access to the Italian concerto style when the duke acquired copies of Vivaldi’s music. Assimilating Vivaldi’s melodic clarity and rhythmic style, Bach fused them with his own contrapuntal ingenuity when writing his mature instrumental works. In addition to composing his own concertos in the Italian format, he also made transcriptions of them for from one to four harpsichords (and some for organ). The Concerto for Violin and Oboe on this program went through this kind of life cycle. Scholars believe it to have been written in Cöthen, but the only version of it exists in a transcription for two harpsichords from Bach’s Leipzig period (1723-1750). Because the melody lines are identifiably characteristic as violin and oboe lines, the transcription has been reversed into a concerto for those two solo instruments. 

Probable portrait of Vivaldi, c. 1723

Classical Oboe - photo by OboeCrack - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4768017

Bach used Vivaldi’s three-movement model for the concerto. The Allegro first movement features relatively equal soloists. The Adagio second movement, however, principally features the oboe, with violin supporting it and highlighted only in a short cadenza. The final movement, Allegro, provides plenty of idiomatic music for both instruments; the oboe generally provides the melody while the violin executes virtuosic decoration above.  
​                                                                                                                                                                                               Judith Eckelmeyer ©2014

---

Anthony Robson, oboe; Elizabeth Wallfisch, violin, with The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment