Keyboard Concerto No. 1 in D Minor

The Harpsichord Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1052 was probably written for Bach’s student-based music society which gave concerts at Zimmermann’s coffee house in Leipzig during the 1730s. It is the best-known of his seven keyboard concertos, with a dramatic style and minor-key emotionalism which appealed strongly to 19th-century tastes and led to its early revival in the 1830s with Felix Mendelssohn at the piano. What sets this work apart from Bach’s other harpsichord concertos is the extraordinary improvisatory freedom and virtuosity granted to the soloist. It is possible that, like his other keyboard concertos, Bach arranged it from one of his earlier (now lost) violin concertos, but overall, the keyboard writing is convincingly idiomatic, falling effortlessly under the fingers of both hands. The first movement (“Allegro”) draws its drama and cohesion from the terse theme played by everyone together at the opening: it reappears regularly throughout, and shorter elements infuse the accompaniment. The following “Adagio” also uses a unison theme to bookend and underpin the movement, while the harpsichord’s right hand sings a beautifully ornamented melody. Bach ends with a brilliant finale (“Allegro”)—intense but triumphant. In 1728, Bach reworked the music for all three movements in Cantatas 146 and 188, reassigning the solo part to the organ. About J.S. Bach's Keyboard Concertos The keyboard concerto arrived late in the Baroque. Its two pioneers—Bach and Handel—took up the form independently, nearly simultaneously and almost accidentally. Bach first experimented in his Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, and during the 1730s he went on to create 13 concertos for one, two, three and four harpsichords (BWV 1052-65), probably for his student-based music society, which gave concerts at Zimmermann’s coffee house in Leipzig. Bach didn’t so much compose these concertos as arrange them, taking earlier concertos for the violin and oboe and reworking them for the harpsichord. Bach himself may have played his seven solo concertos, while contemporary accounts tell us that the multiple harpsichord concertos relied on his elder sons and pupils as soloists.