Double Keyboard Concerto No. 3 in C Minor

For anyone encountering BWV 1062 for the first time there’s an inevitable moment of double take. Surely that thrusting opening theme is familiar. And isn’t the harpsichord continuo part (supplying the harmonic underpinning) a little more prominent than usual? The C Minor Concerto for Two Harpsichords is, in fact, a reworking of the celebrated Double Violin Concerto BWV 1043, its key simply transposed downwards, and the two solo violin parts worked up into something more idiomatic for their keyboard usurpers. Faced with adding a part for the left hand, Bach sometimes merely doubles the bass line; but he also can’t help coming up with something new and takes advantage of the four available hands to amplify the solo textures. The result is a new work, retaining the impetuous brio of the original’s outer movements, but perhaps sounding a little darker in the new key and added density of texture. More fulsome, too, is the sublime middle movement, with its lilting accompaniment—although the harpsichords can never hope to match the violins’ ability to sustain the soaring, long-held notes of the original. 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.