Keyboard Concerto No. 3 in D Major

Bach was the first major composer to write keyboard concertos. Concertos for other instruments—the violin especially—proliferated by the 1720s, as a concerto craze fuelled by Vivaldi swept through Europe. But the emancipation of the harpsichord from its supporting role as part of a continuo group had not yet taken hold. Bach instigated this with his Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, BWV 1050 (finalised in 1721), but the form took shape with the series of keyboard concertos he composed during the 1730s. Bach, the ultimate master of recasting music for multiple purposes, based these on his earlier concertos. The D Major Concerto for Solo Keyboard No. 3, BWV 1054 is a reworking of the E Major Violin Concerto, BWV 1042, transposed down a tone for practical reasons, as the compass of the harpsichord fell a note short of the top Es demanded by the violin part. The first movement starts out like a traditional Baroque ritornello, where a recurring idea is interspersed with different episodes, but turns out to be a more forward-looking tripartite structure, with an extended central section in B minor. The florid violin original is idiomatically rewritten for the keyboard, with virtuoso flourishes suited to the new medium. The slow movement, a beautifully sustained “Adagio” with a typically Bachian inward intensity, is followed by a vigorous rondo finale with the triple-time rhythm of a passepied, like a robust and brisk-tempo minuet. 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 compose 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.