From 1723 until his death in 1750, Johann Sebastian Bach held the demanding position of Thomaskantor, directing music for the principal churches of Leipzig and training the young choristers under his care. Somehow Bach also found the time to direct the Collegium Musicum, an amateur ensemble founded by Georg Philipp Telemann back when he was a student in Leipzig. With most concerts held at a coffee house, the Collegium Musicum provided Bach a space where he could present secular music not fit for church, including the seminal concertos for harpsichord that he wrote to feature himself and his talented sons.

Bach’s harpsichord concertos from the 1730s were not wholly original works, but rather rearrangements of existing scores. His source material has been lost, but often there are enough clues in the music to allow for a reconstruction of what might have existed decades earlier, when Bach wrote concertos for his jobs in Weimar and Cöthen. The task of reconstruction took extra imagination in the case of the Harpsichord Concerto cataloged as BWV 1059, since Bach only copied out the first nine measures in the surviving draft. Those measures corresponded to the opening Sinfonia (or overture) from a cantata that Bach wrote in 1726 for a Sunday church service, in a rendition that uses organ as the featured solo instrument. That cantata also has a second Sinfonia that again features solo organ, forming a matched pair that points to an origin as the outer movements of a three-movement concerto from earlier in Bach’s career. The organ solo makes sense in a church context, but wherever Bach first used this music, he would have more likely featured oboe as the solo instrument.

The slow movement of the concerto required extra leaps of logic to reconstruct, following the hunch that it was the source material for an alto aria from the same cantata. It’s a very modern phenomenon to think in terms of “Great Composers” and the sanctity of the “Classical Canon,” and efforts like this Bach reconstruction are an excellent reminder that these immortal creations were created by busy working musicians who did whatever it took to get parts onto music stands in time for the next gig, with a much more malleable concept of how to make the most of their musical assets.

Aaron Grad ©2022

Pēteris Vasks began his musical career as a bass player, performing with ensembles in his native Latvia and neighboring Lithuania. He eventually went back to school for composition, and since the late 1970s he has produced a remarkable body of instrumental music while also training the next generations of Latvian composers at a conservatory in Riga. His international reputation received a huge boost after the violinist Gidon Kremer premiered Vasks’ concerto Distant Light and then recorded the work with his ensemble Kremerata Baltica for ECM Records in 1999. The composer provided the following program note.

I started composing the fantasy for violin and orchestra Vox amoris in fall 2008 and finished the score in early spring 2009. What is the message I wanted to announce? It is about the greatest power in the whole world — love. Love is, was, and will be as long as we will be. I believe that solo violin and string orchestra make the best combination for a “love story.”

The composition, in one single movement, starts with a muted string tremolo. Then the solo violin appears — searching, asking, until it blossoms in a broad melody which is supported by a gentle orchestral accompaniment. The solo violin Cadenza I links the introductory part with the central episode. The central part of the composition is built up from two sound waves. The first wave starts softly, slowly, and then the intensity increases, becomes stronger, and then decreases. The second wave is broader, more dramatic. The solo violin part becomes more challenging; the string orchestra plays an active role here. Cadenza II emphasizes the way to culmination — the highest point is reached when the solo violin and the orchestra meet — in a high register, in the highest intensity. A quiet pedal point is then the background for images from the beginning. The solo violin once again sings a cantilena of the glory of love. The piece ends in a melancholic yet light mood.

Vox amoris was created by initiative of the Australian Chamber Orchestra and its leader Richard Tognetti. I hope this work will reach the listeners and make the world a little brighter and more open to love.

© Pēteris Vasks

Aaron Grad ©2022

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor received the last part of his name from his father, who had returned home to Sierra Leone (the British colony in Africa originally established as a refuge for those who’d been freed from or escaped enslavement) without learning that a white British woman was pregnant with his son. Samuel’s mother gifted her son with an auspicious name modeled after the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the boy’s grandfather passed on an even greater gift by introducing Samuel to his own instrument, the violin.

Coleridge-Taylor went on to enroll at London’s Royal Academy of Music at the age of 15 as a violinist, and three years later he began composition lessons as well. But even then he was already a published composer, and the Nonet he wrote in 1893, during his first year of formal composition study, shows how far he had already come in absorbing the styles of his heroes, Johannes Brahms and Antonín Dvořák. It was only in later years that Coleridge-Taylor channeled African and African American themes into works that proved hugely influential for future generations of American composers, a project that was still gathering steam when he died of pneumonia at the age of 37.

Coleridge-Taylor showed quite a bit of originality in his Opus 2 by assembling a non-standard nonet of oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, bass and piano. Mixed ensembles of strings and winds had been popular since the time of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven, and there was ample chamber music from the past century combining piano with strings or winds, but this particular configuration of winds, strings and piano added a new level of sonic complexity that the young composer handled with aplomb. The musical materials could easily be mistaken for the themes and harmonies of Brahms or Dvořák, which is quite admirable for the work of a British teenager, and the four attractive movements make a strong case for the enormous talent that allowed Coleridge-Taylor to become a trendsetter and role model.

Aaron Grad ©2022