Keyboard Concerto No. 5 in F Minor

The Harpsichord Concerto in F Minor (BWV 1056) is the shortest of Bach’s seven solo keyboard concertos and, like the others, it was based on an earlier work, or perhaps two—an oboe and a violin concerto (now lost). The outer movements explore two different approaches to the role of the soloist. The first is all about virtuoso display and is dominated by finger-pleasing figurative patterns, while the final “Presto”, with its witty echo effects, is lighter and more lyrical in style as the harpsichord elaborates two solo themes in competition with the orchestra. There’s a completely different atmosphere in the central slow movement (“Largo”) where above the hushed, plucked strings the harpsichord weaves one of Bach’s most haunting, ornamental melodies. He must have loved this movement, for it also appears—with a simpler solo part for oboe—as the orchestral introduction to his church Cantata 156 Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe. 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.