Double Violin Concerto in D Minor

Concertos for two (or more) violins were a Vivaldi speciality; BWV1043, however, seems to be a Bachian one-off. And what a one-off! With two soloists to bounce ideas off each other, the opening “Vivace” (“lively”) is a protean bundle of energy propelled by a dynamic theme bristling with fugal possibilities; while in the finale, equally propulsive tight-knit motifs are deployed with rapid-fire precision. In between these outer movements, glowering with D minor truculence, comes major-key balm from the work’s best-loved movement: the “Largo ma non tanto” (“spacious but not too much so”). Above a lambent, long-short Siciliano rhythm, and with accompaniment kept simple so as to rock the cradle without drawing attention to itself, a solo violin initiates some of the most sublime duetting Bach ever wrote. An autograph of BWV1043 can be sourced to around 1730, and parts for the two soloists are to be found in Bach’s own hand; but it may be that the Concerto started life more than a decade earlier, and quite possibly as a trio sonata since it works convincingly without the concerto’s addition of violas. If Bach composed it during the Köthen years (1717-23), the violin parts could well have been written with Joseph Speiss and Martin Friedrich Marcus in mind, two starry Berlin violinists recently recruited to Prince Leopold’s Court.