Bach was mortal alright. As a young man in Arnstadt in 1706, he was reprimanded by the authorities for bringing a "strange maiden" up into the church organ loft to "make music". No doubt he was embarrassed. The maiden in question was probably his future first wife, Maria Barbara.
Oh, but it's such a delightful piece. Yes, the violin version by Vivaldi sounds better, but the sheer fun of it gets me every time. There is an absolutely delicious version for four marimbas out there, by an ensemble calling itself "The Wave Quartet". Just terrific.
Every harpsichord has it's own inharmonicity so tuning them exactly together is an impossible task. Of course Bach knew this and in fact the 4 harpsichords play more one after the other than together. As far as I know the score , 2 playing really together is the norm so the horrible tuning problems are mostly avoided. I think the 6 Brandenburg is much worse. A muddy and undistinguishable mess of low notes.
I can see your point here. Yes, it's clangorous and noisy, but I still consider it one of my guilty pleasures...much like 1812 Overture (which have always and will always love, despite the snobbish detractors). The Quadruple Concerto always makes me smile.
No way! This is one of the works that got me into being a harpsichord performer back in my teens. Putting the LP on for the first time just blew me away and I knew my destiny from that point. I totally dislike the practice of using pianos instead of harpsichord for Bach ensemble work as mentioned in comments but anyone is entitled to their own taste. I find pianos even thicker and mushier. Harpsichords in general are easily swamped by just a few strings so I don’t agree with the comments about balance. I struggle to hear myself with just one violin sometimes. Bach was an inveterate arranger and transcriber of his own and other people’s works. He invariably enriched or illuminated the original through his own original genius. It was not a question often of which sounded better but what could be reused, reworked etc to fit a specific purpose. You can prefer a sonata for two flutes over the gamba and hpsd version. And you can prefer the Vivaldi original to Bach’s version. To my ears the Vivaldi (which am performing in this March) sounds crude and skeletal in comparison. So depends on your perspective too.
It depends on the harpsichord. CPE Bach insisted on having one in the "pit" orchestra for opera performances because of their volume and ability to cut through the sound of the larger ensemble. If you're a harpsichord performer, you really ought to know better.
Would be curious to hear your take on the most embarrassing work by Ravel. One of the Prix de Rome cantatas, or perhaps: Duo for cello and violin ? I’d vote for the latter one. (I never understood this piece)
I agree with @flaneurSolitaire, this is sheer fun. A few years ago it was part of a whole recital of multi-harpsichord pieces in our local Catharinakerk in Eindhoven. It was an absolute racket. I almost laughed out loud.
Couldn't disagree more. I like this piece - it's no masterpiece and nobody ever said it was - but it's fun and kind of funky. Your dislike seems to stem more from the horror of 4 harpsichords, but Bach is careful not to have them all playing all the time: I think the Netherlands Bach Society do a fine version of it online. For me, the only work of Bach's that might stray into embarrassing territory is the Coffee cantata: OK, we all like coffee, but this woman is demented.
I actually like the Coffee Cantata. Certainly preferable to the Peasants Cantata in my view (and not just mine). For me, that's the work that comes closest to 'embarassing'
Dave I have just discovered your website and it’s really wonderful. Been “binge-watching” and having great fun along the way. Clearly you like to provoke comment. And I have taken the bait. For me this was Bach just doing it because he could and, I like to think, for the sheer fun of it. How wonderful and pleasurable it must have been for Bach to have knocked off someone else’s work and put his own spin on it. He must have seen the comedy in a concerto for not two but four violins and in making it even funnier by switching harpsichords for violins. I have seen this live once and it was a great aural and visual spectacle and throughly enjoyable. [I have three versions on CD (not by choice they just came as part of sets) but the best one by far is the English Concert with Pinnock taking the lead.] The middle movement with its buzzing bee harpsichords is marvellous. Puts me in mind of a sweaty summer afternoon in splendid Venice. I find all of Bach’s reworkings of Vivaldi fascinating, and this perhaps the most fascinating of all. Certainly not embarrassing. You devoted a whole video to Bach leaving you cold - and I get that and applaud your honesty- but for me this was Bach having fun. It always makes me smile. And I am sure you too. And it’s definitely a piece to see live. In Bach’s day this was rock and roll. Can you imagine the fun he must have had playing the lead harpsichord and holding the whole gig together, while ladies at Zimmerman’s threw their underwear at him? Maybe he DID play it at home too. Its not like he was short of harpsichordists in the family. Which puts me in mind of this. Bach had 20 children by two wives. How the hell he found the time and the stamina I have no idea. But he was clearly a man who knew how to work hard and play hard.
The second movement, with the wonderful interweaving of the solo violins in the central sections, is a favorite Vivaldi moment for me. Rewritten for a room full of harpsichords is the very embodiment of clunky-ness.
I don’t know if any of Bach’s music is really embarrassing as such. There are some early works which don’t quite come off. I find the first fugal section of the organ Toccata in E Major BWV566 boring and unfocussed. It’s based on a boring subject, it’s over-extended, and the young Bach hasn’t yet developed that mastery of harmonic flow which informs his mature fugues. But that doesn’t make the piece “embarrassing” to listen to. It’s just a bit dull. I don’t know Bach’s secular cantatas very well, apart from the Coffee and Peasant cantatas, but maybe there are some “cringe” moments there. We don’t usually go to Bach for funny. To judge from the (fragmentary) Quodlibet and a few other pieces, my impression is that Bach’s humour was rather coarse and basic. I actually like the Peasant Cantata a lot. It may be the least Bach-like piece of Bach. It sounds very Rococo/Galant.
Totally agree with this choice. I never understood why Bach couldn’t just compress it into one or two keyboards given how much goes on in his solo pieces. However, I do still enjoy it as a guilty pleasure, with emphasis on “guilty”.
In the second movement of the quadruple harpsichord concerto, there is a long passage where all the soloists play arpeggiated material without any string accompaniment and at times it comes close to sounding like something by Philip Glass. Now _that_ is truly embarrassing.
This piece was also an embarassing grift by Deutsche Grammophon because they did a recording of it with former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt playing one of the piano parts, alongside Christoph Eschenbach, Justus Frantz, and Gerhard Oppitz. He was an excellent amateur pianist, as well as an all-round likeable person who gave zero f***s to social pressure (chain smoking menthol cigarettes on TV for years after smoking on TV was banned), but there was no reason other than trying to tap in to the pool of tens of millions of Germans (both SPD supporters and opposition supporters) who knew him because he was the chancellor before Helmut Kohl took over.
Yes, I met him at a performance of Tosca in Washington, D. C.--sat next to him--and we had a delightful conversation about both music and that particular recording.
I fully agree. I love 18th century music and know it rather well, and I always appreciated Vivaldi more than Bach, not only for that particular work, but for their whole work !
To be honest, I have however to confess that I have just re-listened to Bach's Complete Harpsichord Concertos by Trevor Pinnock, and that it is a highly valuable music too !
I love the concertos for one, two, three, and four harpsichords. My favorite recording is by Silvia Marlowe and Daniel Saidenberg, long out of print on Decca. My only dissappointment is that Bach didn't continue the trend and write concerti for six, eight and twelve harpsichords. Bach was a master of concerto writing. So if people can record bach on marimbas, electric guitars, zylophones, brass quartets, a capella vocalists and modern pianos, I can enjoy listening to Vivaldi violin concerti remastered for four harpsichords and I do! Now I am going to go and listen to DeFalla's harpsichord concerto. I only wish he had written one for four harpsichords, oh well.
Was there ever a quadrophonic recording made of this piece? That might have been cool with the right drugs. There’s something very 70s about this piece. I think there’s something the Historically Informed folks have not yet figured out about not just this piece, but harpsichord concertos in general. There must have been some kind of performance practice or acoustical phenomena back in the 18th century that the scholars have missed in trying to recreate them for modern performance. Bach would not have written so many of them if they sounded as crappy as our attempts to play them make them sound. There is some piece of the puzzle that’s missing. Perhaps there’s a clue in the one harpsichord concerto that actually does work, and was coincidentally the very first one ever written: the fifth Brandenburg Concerto. The first movement is constructed ingeniously so that the mild-mannered continuo player starts ornamenting his part so elaborately the other instruments gradually fade out so that our ears are adjusted to listen to the harpsichord. It works beautifully and dramatically. And he sustains this listener-conscious approach through all three movements in different ways. Maybe it’s the kind of thing you can only do once. (The Triple Concerto, which I and many others suspect is actually by CPE, is far less successful.) I am convinced that his other solo keyboard concertos are best played on the organ, and based on the fact that he transcribed several movements of them as cantata sinfonias using organ as the solo instrument I think he might have agreed. But that doesn’t explain his concertos for multiple keyboards. He can only have meant them for harpsichord and they sound terrible in modern performance. But he wouldn’t have written six of them for various quantities if they sounded that bad then. Anyway, yes Bach was mortal. There are several cringey moments in the cantatas, enough to fill a 2-CD set in my estimation. And there’s a joke at the heart of the Peasant Cantata that Bach evidently found hilarious that I don’t get and am pretty sure I don’t want to.
Brandenburg 5 was always conceived for harpsichord. All of the other concertos, except for the C major Concerto for Two Harpsichords, were adaptations of works originally composed for violins, oboes etc. Various scholars have created reconstructions of the originals and, for me, they mostly sound better than the harpsichord adaptations. This is especially apparent in the slow movements. Both the slow movements of the A Major and F minor concertos seem to need an instrument which can realise a longer, more sustained line than the harpsichordist’s right hand can. I have heard some good performances of the harpsichord concertos on harpsichord. For me they work best when the “orchestra” is just a string quintet.
I wonder if, when Bach was requested by his patron to model the style of the then fashionable Vivaldi, he was deliberately trying to butcher Vivaldi's music so he would not be oblighed to immitate another unbidden composer's style in future? When I worked my way through the collected works of Bach (yes Dave, I have actually listed to it all...) there was such a marked drop in quality during this period it was as if one was suddenly listenening to a child's composition in comparison. It might have been a failure of the teutonic brain to grasp the italian passion, but it could have been a recalcitrent protest - we will never know for sure. On a side note, I wish there was a Bach box set with the pieces organised in chronological order - we could witness Bach's progress over time and see his mortal shortcomings improve.
Well, Dave, I don't agree with your assessment, but, what else is new? It's not a bad piece and what if Bach just wanted to create the first "monster" concert? But I am a loyal fan because after going through grad school and getting a doctorate then turning into a professor (albeit briefly), I came across many ambulatory musical encyclopedias. But none of them had your winning charm and irresistible humor and original perspective. In other words, you've transcended your immense storehouse of knowledge and made it all human. Thank you for that!
@@DavesClassicalGuide I hope I haven't misrepresented myself because I actually do agree with you most of the time. After all I keep tuning in. L & K, Dennis
Yes, to listen that Concerto as a recorded piece - even with good equipment and loudspeakers - is not pleasant to my ears. But I think in this case, as you said, we have a mixture of Hausmusik (mainly for the enjoyment of the players), master and students piece and a showpiece, like four guitarrists in a special, loudly, rock performance. Even in modern times a teacher, like Leonhardt, invited his students to play as a kind of "ceremony", but it is frustrating not to hear or even conceive what all the 4 left hands are doing. Regarding the "original", C major two hasprsichords Concerto, I think is the only one of the concertos that sounds better without the support of a string section, just as a 4 hands work.
It sounds a lot better on four pianos! There is a lively recording from the mid-70s by the Orchestra of the Liszt Ferenc Academy; good luck finding it. Pianist #4 was an obscure 20-something named Andras Schiff, at that time doubtlessly dreaming of being promoted to third pianist someday.
I don't know if I agree or not with the condemnation of the piece to the pits of shamedom since I have not heard it yet, but this was absolutely hilarious ! The image of an orgy of clunky skeletons on the roof is going to stick to this music wether I adore it or hate ! Or I might love it just because of that :D
@@Igor_Itkin I don't think the value of Dave's content depends on the quality of the video. If the webcam does the job and Dave likes it, why bother buying a new one?
I think BWV 1045 is worse: some ceremonious and lushy piece that is supposed to be a fragment of a concerto, a sinfonia or the ritornello of a chorus, but it's clearly a work-in-progress or a misguided attempt or sketch of something that Bach kept in a drawer because, sincerely, despite the luxurious instrumentation and upbeat sounding phrasing, it is an uncooked, shapeless, nowhere-going exposition of unremarkable melodies. I don't think he ever thought of it as something to perform, at least in the state we know it.
The D minor prelude from Well Tempered Clavier Book 2 is one of his most boring pieces. Probably the most embarassing of the works he actually wrote himself
@@shantihealer Ive heard it, he makes the best of limited material. A lot of the motifs are just the same bar played 3 times with 1-2 notes changed, then again in counterpoint. Piece has no real direction and just kind of ends. Not the most inspired work
Listen to it on piano instead. It sounds better. Bach did not exactly have a huge variety of keyboard instruments to choose from. As a composition, it's just fine - quite wonderful.
@@DavesClassicalGuide - Yes, he did. But perhaps not all of his keyboard instruments were equally suitable for each of his various keyboard works? And I'm not really quite sure if Bach composed works only for very specific keyboard instruments by specific direction. But I don't think it matters much, because I don't particularly favor recordings using only "original instruments" or whichever claim is commonly made. I love hearing the Goldberg Variations on both the harpsichord AND the piano. But it seems that few harpsichord players have an amenable technique. The characteristic of Bach's music is such that it almost doesn't seem to matter which specific instruments are used. His character comes through loud and clear in ANY event. That analysis is nothing more than a personal opinion. There's not a scintilla of intellect involved. All you do is basically say you don't like the composition. Well, big deal. Who gives a crap if you don't like it? You don't like harpsichords? Who cares? You somehow think Bach "cheated" because he borrowed a theme from Vivaldi? That sort of thing was VERY common way back in the day, and was very acceptable, so YOU the dumb dude are NOT educating us about anything new. Why not do an analysis about the actual MUSIC? Yes, the COMPOSITION itself?
Bach was mortal alright. As a young man in Arnstadt in 1706, he was reprimanded by the authorities for bringing a "strange maiden" up into the church organ loft to "make music". No doubt he was embarrassed. The maiden in question was probably his future first wife, Maria Barbara.
Oh, but it's such a delightful piece. Yes, the violin version by Vivaldi sounds better, but the sheer fun of it gets me every time. There is an absolutely delicious version for four marimbas out there, by an ensemble calling itself "The Wave Quartet". Just terrific.
Otherwise known as the harpsichord tuner's nightmare.
Every harpsichord has it's own inharmonicity so tuning them exactly together is an impossible task. Of course Bach knew this and in fact the 4 harpsichords play more one after the other than together. As far as I know the score , 2 playing really together is the norm so the horrible tuning problems are mostly avoided. I think the 6 Brandenburg is much worse. A muddy and undistinguishable mess of low notes.
I can see your point here. Yes, it's clangorous and noisy, but I still consider it one of my guilty pleasures...much like 1812 Overture (which have always and will always love, despite the snobbish detractors). The Quadruple Concerto always makes me smile.
Yes, but as I've said so many times, whether you like it or not is irrelevant to the question at hand. I like it too. It's a party record.
hahahaha I feel the same about the 1812 overture. But also tchaikovsky hated a bunch of his works which I like!
No way! This is one of the works that got me into being a harpsichord performer back in my teens. Putting the LP on for the first time just blew me away and I knew my destiny from that point. I totally dislike the practice of using pianos instead of harpsichord for Bach ensemble work as mentioned in comments but anyone is entitled to their own taste. I find pianos even thicker and mushier. Harpsichords in general are easily swamped by just a few strings so I don’t agree with the comments about balance. I struggle to hear myself with just one violin sometimes. Bach was an inveterate arranger and transcriber of his own and other people’s works. He invariably enriched or illuminated the original through his own original genius. It was not a question often of which sounded better but what could be reused, reworked etc to fit a specific purpose. You can prefer a sonata for two flutes over the gamba and hpsd version. And you can prefer the Vivaldi original to Bach’s version. To my ears the Vivaldi (which am performing in this March) sounds crude and skeletal in comparison. So depends on your perspective too.
It depends on the harpsichord. CPE Bach insisted on having one in the "pit" orchestra for opera performances because of their volume and ability to cut through the sound of the larger ensemble. If you're a harpsichord performer, you really ought to know better.
I have played the Leonhardt version - I see what you mean, and for me the copulating skeleton image will forever accompany it.
Already waiting for the Brucker roast, fasten your seat belts folks!
Dave. Come on. Nobody could even dare to judge Bach. I know you are just provoking people and laughing behind our back. Bach is a holly relic.
Yech. To hell with that.
@@DavesClassicalGuide with Bach or with holly relic ;)
Would be curious to hear your take on the most embarrassing work by Ravel. One of the Prix de Rome cantatas, or perhaps: Duo for cello and violin ? I’d vote for the latter one. (I never understood this piece)
I agree with @flaneurSolitaire, this is sheer fun. A few years ago it was part of a whole recital of multi-harpsichord pieces in our local Catharinakerk in Eindhoven. It was an absolute racket. I almost laughed out loud.
Couldn't disagree more. I like this piece - it's no masterpiece and nobody ever said it was - but it's fun and kind of funky. Your dislike seems to stem more from the horror of 4 harpsichords, but Bach is careful not to have them all playing all the time: I think the Netherlands Bach Society do a fine version of it online.
For me, the only work of Bach's that might stray into embarrassing territory is the Coffee cantata: OK, we all like coffee, but this woman is demented.
I actually like the Coffee Cantata. Certainly preferable to the Peasants Cantata in my view (and not just mine). For me, that's the work that comes closest to 'embarassing'
@@ugolomb Ahh.. peasant singing "Our Lord is the super duper best Lord you could have!" You yearn for the French Revolution..
Who said I dislike it? I don't. Not a bit. But it IS pretty stupid.
The coffe cantata is amazing!
Dave I have just discovered your website and it’s really wonderful. Been “binge-watching” and having great fun along the way. Clearly you like to provoke comment. And I have taken the bait. For me this was Bach just doing it because he could and, I like to think, for the sheer fun of it. How wonderful and pleasurable it must have been for Bach to have knocked off someone else’s work and put his own spin on it. He must have seen the comedy in a concerto for not two but four violins and in making it even funnier by switching harpsichords for violins. I have seen this live once and it was a great aural and visual spectacle and throughly enjoyable. [I have three versions on CD (not by choice they just came as part of sets) but the best one by far is the English Concert with Pinnock taking the lead.] The middle movement with its buzzing bee harpsichords is marvellous. Puts me in mind of a sweaty summer afternoon in splendid Venice. I find all of Bach’s reworkings of Vivaldi fascinating, and this perhaps the most fascinating of all. Certainly not embarrassing. You devoted a whole video to Bach leaving you cold - and I get that and applaud your honesty- but for me this was Bach having fun. It always makes me smile. And I am sure you too. And it’s definitely a piece to see live. In Bach’s day this was rock and roll. Can you imagine the fun he must have had playing the lead harpsichord and holding the whole gig together, while ladies at Zimmerman’s threw their underwear at him? Maybe he DID play it at home too. Its not like he was short of harpsichordists in the family. Which puts me in mind of this. Bach had 20 children by two wives. How the hell he found the time and the stamina I have no idea. But he was clearly a man who knew how to work hard and play hard.
The second movement, with the wonderful interweaving of the solo violins in the central sections, is a favorite Vivaldi moment for me. Rewritten for a room full of harpsichords is the very embodiment of clunky-ness.
Exactly
I don’t know if any of Bach’s music is really embarrassing as such. There are some early works which don’t quite come off. I find the first fugal section of the organ Toccata in E Major BWV566 boring and unfocussed. It’s based on a boring subject, it’s over-extended, and the young Bach hasn’t yet developed that mastery of harmonic flow which informs his mature fugues. But that doesn’t make the piece “embarrassing” to listen to. It’s just a bit dull.
I don’t know Bach’s secular cantatas very well, apart from the Coffee and Peasant cantatas, but maybe there are some “cringe” moments there. We don’t usually go to Bach for funny. To judge from the (fragmentary) Quodlibet and a few other pieces, my impression is that Bach’s humour was rather coarse and basic. I actually like the Peasant Cantata a lot. It may be the least Bach-like piece of Bach. It sounds very Rococo/Galant.
The Coffee cantata is a delight, a good illustration of Bach in good humor.
Totally agree with this choice. I never understood why Bach couldn’t just compress it into one or two keyboards given how much goes on in his solo pieces. However, I do still enjoy it as a guilty pleasure, with emphasis on “guilty”.
In the second movement of the quadruple harpsichord concerto, there is a long passage where all the soloists play arpeggiated material without any string accompaniment and at times it comes close to sounding like something by Philip Glass. Now _that_ is truly embarrassing.
Maybe it inspired Reich's Six Pianos?
This piece was also an embarassing grift by Deutsche Grammophon because they did a recording of it with former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt playing one of the piano parts, alongside Christoph Eschenbach, Justus Frantz, and Gerhard Oppitz.
He was an excellent amateur pianist, as well as an all-round likeable person who gave zero f***s to social pressure (chain smoking menthol cigarettes on TV for years after smoking on TV was banned), but there was no reason other than trying to tap in to the pool of tens of millions of Germans (both SPD supporters and opposition supporters) who knew him because he was the chancellor before Helmut Kohl took over.
Yes, I met him at a performance of Tosca in Washington, D. C.--sat next to him--and we had a delightful conversation about both music and that particular recording.
I fully agree. I love 18th century music and know it rather well, and I always appreciated Vivaldi more than Bach, not only for that particular work, but for their whole work !
To be honest, I have however to confess that I have just re-listened to Bach's Complete Harpsichord Concertos by Trevor Pinnock, and that it is a highly valuable music too !
Maybe you don’t get counterpoint?
Any work with four harpsichords is at least three too many.
I love the concertos for one, two, three, and four harpsichords. My favorite recording is by Silvia Marlowe and Daniel Saidenberg, long out of print on Decca. My only dissappointment is that Bach didn't continue the trend and write concerti for six, eight and twelve harpsichords. Bach was a master of concerto writing. So if people can record bach on marimbas, electric guitars, zylophones, brass quartets, a capella vocalists and modern pianos, I can enjoy listening to Vivaldi violin concerti remastered for four harpsichords and I do! Now I am going to go and listen to DeFalla's harpsichord concerto. I only wish he had written one for four harpsichords, oh well.
Was there ever a quadrophonic recording made of this piece? That might have been cool with the right drugs. There’s something very 70s about this piece.
I think there’s something the Historically Informed folks have not yet figured out about not just this piece, but harpsichord concertos in general. There must have been some kind of performance practice or acoustical phenomena back in the 18th century that the scholars have missed in trying to recreate them for modern performance. Bach would not have written so many of them if they sounded as crappy as our attempts to play them make them sound. There is some piece of the puzzle that’s missing.
Perhaps there’s a clue in the one harpsichord concerto that actually does work, and was coincidentally the very first one ever written: the fifth Brandenburg Concerto. The first movement is constructed ingeniously so that the mild-mannered continuo player starts ornamenting his part so elaborately the other instruments gradually fade out so that our ears are adjusted to listen to the harpsichord. It works beautifully and dramatically. And he sustains this listener-conscious approach through all three movements in different ways. Maybe it’s the kind of thing you can only do once. (The Triple Concerto, which I and many others suspect is actually by CPE, is far less successful.)
I am convinced that his other solo keyboard concertos are best played on the organ, and based on the fact that he transcribed several movements of them as cantata sinfonias using organ as the solo instrument I think he might have agreed. But that doesn’t explain his concertos for multiple keyboards. He can only have meant them for harpsichord and they sound terrible in modern performance. But he wouldn’t have written six of them for various quantities if they sounded that bad then.
Anyway, yes Bach was mortal. There are several cringey moments in the cantatas, enough to fill a 2-CD set in my estimation. And there’s a joke at the heart of the Peasant Cantata that Bach evidently found hilarious that I don’t get and am pretty sure I don’t want to.
Brandenburg 5 was always conceived for harpsichord. All of the other concertos, except for the C major Concerto for Two Harpsichords, were adaptations of works originally composed for violins, oboes etc. Various scholars have created reconstructions of the originals and, for me, they mostly sound better than the harpsichord adaptations. This is especially apparent in the slow movements. Both the slow movements of the A Major and F minor concertos seem to need an instrument which can realise a longer, more sustained line than the harpsichordist’s right hand can.
I have heard some good performances of the harpsichord concertos on harpsichord. For me they work best when the “orchestra” is just a string quintet.
I wonder if, when Bach was requested by his patron to model the style of the then fashionable Vivaldi, he was deliberately trying to butcher Vivaldi's music so he would not be oblighed to immitate another unbidden composer's style in future? When I worked my way through the collected works of Bach (yes Dave, I have actually listed to it all...) there was such a marked drop in quality during this period it was as if one was suddenly listenening to a child's composition in comparison. It might have been a failure of the teutonic brain to grasp the italian passion, but it could have been a recalcitrent protest - we will never know for sure. On a side note, I wish there was a Bach box set with the pieces organised in chronological order - we could witness Bach's progress over time and see his mortal shortcomings improve.
Well, Dave, I don't agree with your assessment, but, what else is new? It's not a bad piece and what if Bach just wanted to create the first "monster" concert? But I am a loyal fan because after going through grad school and getting a doctorate then turning into a professor (albeit briefly), I came across many ambulatory musical encyclopedias. But none of them had your winning charm and irresistible humor and original perspective. In other words, you've transcended your immense storehouse of knowledge and made it all human. Thank you for that!
You're welcome. You should also try agreeing with my assessment now and then. You might be surprised! ;)
@@DavesClassicalGuide I hope I haven't misrepresented myself because I actually do agree with you most of the time. After all I keep tuning in. L & K, Dennis
Yes, to listen that Concerto as a recorded piece - even with good equipment and loudspeakers - is not pleasant to my ears. But I think in this case, as you said, we have a mixture of Hausmusik (mainly for the enjoyment of the players), master and students piece and a showpiece, like four guitarrists in a special, loudly, rock performance. Even in modern times a teacher, like Leonhardt, invited his students to play as a kind of "ceremony", but it is frustrating not to hear or even conceive what all the 4 left hands are doing. Regarding the "original", C major two hasprsichords Concerto, I think is the only one of the concertos that sounds better without the support of a string section, just as a 4 hands work.
It sounds a lot better on four pianos! There is a lively recording from the mid-70s by the Orchestra of the Liszt Ferenc Academy; good luck finding it. Pianist #4 was an obscure 20-something named Andras Schiff, at that time doubtlessly dreaming of being promoted to third pianist someday.
I don't know if I agree or not with the condemnation of the piece to the pits of shamedom since I have not heard it yet, but this was absolutely hilarious ! The image of an orgy of clunky skeletons on the roof is going to stick to this music wether I adore it or hate ! Or I might love it just because of that :D
There's a lovely performance on RUclips for 4 pianos played by Argerich, Kissin, Levine, and Pletnev.
Why don't you get a better webcam?
I like this one.
@@DavesClassicalGuide you and your viewers will enjoy an 1080p cam more.
@@Igor_Itkin I don't think the value of Dave's content depends on the quality of the video. If the webcam does the job and Dave likes it, why bother buying a new one?
I think BWV 1045 is worse: some ceremonious and lushy piece that is supposed to be a fragment of a concerto, a sinfonia or the ritornello of a chorus, but it's clearly a work-in-progress or a misguided attempt or sketch of something that Bach kept in a drawer because, sincerely, despite the luxurious instrumentation and upbeat sounding phrasing, it is an uncooked, shapeless, nowhere-going exposition of unremarkable melodies. I don't think he ever thought of it as something to perform, at least in the state we know it.
Coffee cantata is pretty ridiculous.
But fun, and deliberately light-hearted.
It's delightful.
@@DavesClassicalGuide I fully agree : "Heute noch ..."
The D minor prelude from Well Tempered Clavier Book 2 is one of his most boring pieces. Probably the most embarassing of the works he actually wrote himself
In the hands of Richter it's a delightful miniature masterpiece, rapid, rippling, playful, highly enjoyable! The fugue is more prosaic.
@@shantihealer Ive heard it, he makes the best of limited material. A lot of the motifs are just the same bar played 3 times with 1-2 notes changed, then again in counterpoint. Piece has no real direction and just kind of ends. Not the most inspired work
i wonder if he did something like this because he thought it was funny.
Listen to it on piano instead. It sounds better.
Bach did not exactly have a huge variety of keyboard instruments to choose from.
As a composition, it's just fine - quite wonderful.
Actually he had an enormous variety of keyboard instruments--far more than we have today.
@@DavesClassicalGuide - Yes, he did. But perhaps not all of his keyboard instruments were equally suitable for each of his various keyboard works?
And I'm not really quite sure if Bach composed works only for very specific keyboard instruments by specific direction. But I don't think it matters much, because I don't particularly favor recordings using only "original instruments" or whichever claim is commonly made. I love hearing the Goldberg Variations on both the harpsichord AND the piano. But it seems that few harpsichord players have an amenable technique. The characteristic of Bach's music is such that it almost doesn't seem to matter which specific instruments are used. His character comes through loud and clear in ANY event.
That analysis is nothing more than a personal opinion. There's not a scintilla of intellect involved. All you do is basically say you don't like the composition. Well, big deal. Who gives a crap if you don't like it? You don't like harpsichords? Who cares? You somehow think Bach "cheated" because he borrowed a theme from Vivaldi? That sort of thing was VERY common way back in the day, and was very acceptable, so YOU the dumb dude are NOT educating us about anything new. Why not do an analysis about the actual MUSIC? Yes, the COMPOSITION itself?