Bach: Brandenburg Concertos

The 2024-25 Chamber Season at the Auditorium Parco della Musica, as every year, offers the public of Santa Cecilia the best of the Italian and international musical panorama: among the many artists and performers we remember the Freiburger Barockorchester which opens the season at the end of October with Bach's Brandenburg Concerts.

The so-called Brandenburg Concertos (BWV 1046-1051) were composed by Johann Sebastian Bach in the years in which he had settled in Köthen (1717-1723), near the Duchy of Saxony, to work as Kapellmeister and director of chamber music at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, a man of culture and great lover of music who, in 1696, founded the Academy of Arts in Berlin. The term “Brandenburgers” is linked to the recipient and dedicatee of the Concertos, Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt, who the composer met during his stay in Berlin. In fact, the original title given to it by Bach was Concerts avec plusieurs instruments, a title that remained until 1879, the year in which the German musicologist Philip Spitta changed it to Brandenburg Concertos.

The famous Concertos, which remained almost completely unknown for many decades following the death of the great composer, were not composed completely ex novo: the different movements in fact, derive from the reworking of works or parts of works composed by the young Bach and are clearly different between them both in the internal articulation of movements and in style.

Today among Bach's best-known and best-loved works, the Concertos are performed in the major concert halls of the world by the best performers and their discography is extremely vast.

Photo credits: courtesy of the Auditorium Parco della Musica