Orchestral Suite No. 1 in C Major

The fruity gurglings of oboes and bassoon lend the C Major Suite a very particular colouring. There’s a rustic quality that tones down the traditionally haughty opening of the overture, rendering its grandeur more genial, and it merges almost seamlessly into the central section where the chattering woodwind form a little self-contained choir. BWV 1066 likes to do things in duplicate when it comes to the dances. The dances are served up in pairs, aside from the “Courante” and the eddying “Forlane”. The second of the dapper gavottes spotlights the wind instruments, as strings interject breezy fanfares; the swaggeringly self-confident “Menuet 1” is in marked contrast to the swooning sighs of its sibling, while “Bourrée 2” is allotted solely to the winds, anticipating the trio section of a classical symphony minuet. For his last dance Bach steps out with the “Passepied”, a French courtly dance of Breton pedigree, and with courtly sophistication, insouciantly decorated by the oboes, “No. 11 Passepied” is a camouflaged version of the first. About J.S. Bach's Orchestral Suites Unlike the six Brandenburg Concertos, Bach’s Orchestral Suites (he designated them Ouvertüren⁠—Overtures) were not conceived as a set. And though they probably achieved their final form in Leipzig, where they would have been perfect for the convivial coffee-house gatherings of the student Collegium Musicum, their composition likely spans more than two decades (culminating in BWV 1067 dating from the late 1730s). The design leans on the French model nurtured by Lully, in which a sequence of dance movements is preceded by an overture whose outer sections, full of pomp and circumstance, bookend a faster, fugal core. While the ground plan is French, however, Bach inevitably bends it to his own purposes, and no two suites are exactly alike.