Italian Concerto BWV 971

In 1735 Bach published the Italian Concerto, presented here in a revised separate edition, together with the French Overture in the second part of his “Clavier Übung”. The two works were intended to respectively exemplify the Italian and French styles. Thus, the “Concerto” unmistakably imitates an Italian solo concerto, using only the means of the harpsichord.

Tutti and solo passages can be heard as well as the dynamic gradations of the sound layers, which Bach explicitly marked with piano and forte. Energetic outer movements frame an Andante, in which a melancholy cantilena unfolds over unadorned chords. For the revision of this Bach classic, editor Ullrich Scheideler also evaluated, in addition to the prints, early manuscript copies which allowed interesting conclusions about the lost autograph.