Bach for Two

An intimate recital featuring founding director Daniel Lee and artistic director Jeffrey Grossman.

Download Concert Program (7 MB)

Bach’s chamber music is like a Fabergé egg, finely wrought in miniature, with an almost infinite amount of detail. While Bach may be most famous for his colorful Brandenburg concerti and his large settings of the Passion story, it is fascinating to revisit the sonatas. Jeffrey and Daniel present this intimate concert for a limited audience, featuring two of the sonatas for violin and obbligato harpsichord, one of the sonatas for violin and continuo, and solo harpsichord works by composers from Bach’s own library, Charles (François) Dieupart and Jean-Henri D’Anglebert.

The so-called “obbligato sonatas” are notable because they lifted the harpsichord to become an equal partner to the violin. The two hands of the harpsichord essentially fill the roll of two musicians, allowing Bach to fill three independent musical lines. From its opening measures, the E major sonata is as grand as a cathedral, with tolling bass notes and thick writing, and a soaring, majestic violin line. The G major, on the other hand, is playful. Bach revised the G major sonata several times, and in its final versions, it has five movements, including a central movement for the harpsichord alone. Bach’s son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, considered these sonatas “among the best works of my dear departed father. They still sound excellent and give me much joy, although they date back more than fifty years. They contain some Adagii that could not be written in a more singable manner today.”

There is nothing obviously ground-breaking about music for violin and continuo—every composer in the baroque composed sonatas for solo instrument and continuo—but Bach’s “continuo sonatas” are nevertheless special works. The E minor sonata opens with a long, improvisatory fantasia over a pedal tone, an unusual choice for counterpoint-crazy Bach! He makes up for the seemingly-simple opening with three movements based on dances, filled with some of the his most chromatic writing.