If anyone asked me what single piece of music I would take to a desert island, I would choose Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, without a single moment’s hesitation.
I would probably be challenged on whether this set of six pieces was properly a ‘single piece of music’. Fair enough – they are six very different pieces, each with a focus on different solo instruments, and each with their own very distinctive identity. But I feel them as a single entity – asking for a favourite would be as ludicrous as asking which is one’s favourite child.
The first classical music CD I ever bought was the Brandenburgs, played by Neville Marriner and the Academy of Martin in the Fields. I bought it on a family trip to Brighton as a teenager. My tastes in performances of these pieces may have moved on, but that is one of the two CD purchases that I remember as completely re-wiring my brain and the way I thought about music. The other one was Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, also bought on a family holiday.
In talking about the Brandenburgs, I shall first do some gushing – some kind of cathartic purging of thoughts before we get at least a little bit more concrete.
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These pieces are so dizzyingly inventive, so bursting with joy, so overflowing with élan, so completely stuffed full of (I struggled for a while to find the right word here) life.
By ‘life’ I mean a kind of energy, maybe joie de vivre. But it also implies the ups and downs that life itself brings. The sadness and the elation, the agony and the beauty. Bach has shown plenty of all of these – perhaps here he shows slightly more of the latter of each of those pairs. But then life is – whatever its struggles – a miracle.
For me, they are everything I have aspired to as a composer – hedonism, colour, energy, play, beauty, eccentricity, imagination, unpredictability, elegance, richness, wit. Intensely moving yet somehow still emotionally distanced.
They show the most mind-melting skill in counterpoint – nobody could touch Bach in this most revered, cultivated discipline, and none have since. These concertos are like watching somebody solving Rubik’s cubes one after another with one hand, insouciantly beating a chess Grandmaster with the other, all whilst charismatically charming everyone in the room with party tricks and anecdotes.
I hope it’s clear by now that I could bore the arse off anyone about the Brandenburg Concertos should I be given the chance. I will therefore confine myself to writing about just one aspect about why I think they’re so brilliant.
Let’s talk about who the soloists are.
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The strange thing about the Brandenburg Concertos is that none of them are really ‘Concertos’, or at least not in the sense that we understand that term now. Nowadays we think of a single, virtuosic hero at the front of an orchestra. Perhaps battling with them, perhaps ennobled by them.
It was different when Bach was working. At the time, there was the tradition of the ‘concerto grosso’, i.e. a concerto for more than one instrument. Handel, Corelli, Locatelli and many others wrote ‘concerti grossi’. Normally they were pieces for strings and continuo where two or three of those string instruments would be featured and have some ‘show-off’ moments.
Vivaldi and others wrote some with some eccentric groupings – mixing strings and winds, and sometimes using a group of ‘soloists’ numbering five or more. The most extravagant may be his concerto for 2 recorders, 2 trumpets, 2 mandolins, 2 chalumeaux (an early clarinet), 2 theorbos (a very long-necked plucked lute), and 2 instruments possibly of his own invention: ‘violins in tromba marina’, designed to loudly replicate the sound of a trumpet.
The Brandenburgs would, I guess, be classified as this kind of ‘concerto grosso’. However – Vivaldi’s tend to follow the same kinds of structures that his concertos normally do (fast movement, slow movement, faster movement). The Brandenburgs are different – each has a different instrumentation, but each also has a radically different approach to how these instruments ‘behave’, and the extent to which they’re a soloist at all.
In these pieces, soloists are not equal. Sometimes the soloist group are the only instruments playing. Sometimes a small ‘continuo’ (bass and harmony) group provide harmony. Sometimes there’s a group of strings backing them up. Sometimes one or more of the soloists don’t play at all in a movement. Sometimes it’s unclear if there are any soloists at all. Some soloists take a back seat, some are more often at the fore. Occasionally one of them grabs the music by the scruff of the neck and dominate all others into submission.
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The soloists for each movement are:
No 1
Two horns, three oboes, bassoon and a ‘piccolo’ violin
Is this meaningfully a concerto? Two wild, boisterous hunting horns unavoidably draw the attention in the first movement, but are entirely absent in the slow movement. By contrast, the solo violin doesn’t really contribute anything in the first but comes to the fore in the second and especially third (in both of which, the 2nd and 3rd oboes are essentially relegated to accompanists). The final 4th movement sees the whole band essentially as a single orchestra for the bulk of the music, but with detours into a gorgeous trio section for 2 oboes and bassoon, a gentle polacca featuring no soloists at all, and a boisterous horn duet against all 3 oboes playing as one.
For Part Two of my thoughts on the Brandenburgs click here. You’ll need to be one of my Patrons, so click here if you’d like to read it (and more besides).
