Brandenburg Concerto No. 5, BWV 1050

The two violin parts play the same brisk D major refrain over a moving bass. The flute is silent. This refrain is the ritornello, the music the strings bring back between the soloists’ excursions.

Flute and violin exchange short phrases, and the harpsichord’s right hand joins them while its left hand plays the bass. Bach wrote the keyboard’s solo passages out in full, alternating with figured-bass accompaniment.

In 1717 Bach signed a contract with Prince Leopold at Köthen before he had permission to leave Weimar. His employer would not accept his resignation and had him confined for a month. He was released and dismissed in December, and took up the post at Köthen.

An earlier version gives the harpsichord an eighteen-bar solo. In the score dedicated to the Margrave of Brandenburg in 1721, Bach expanded it to sixty-five bars. The flute and violin have no solo of comparable length.

In March 1719 Bach travelled from Köthen to Berlin to collect a new harpsichord for Prince Leopold’s court. He probably played for Margrave Christian Ludwig on that visit. In the 1721 dedication of these concertos Bach recalled doing so “a couple of years ago”.

From 1729 Bach directed Leipzig’s Collegium Musicum, whose weekly concerts at Café Zimmermann moved outdoors in summer. The programmes included his orchestral suites and his violin and harpsichord concertos, and Bach appeared in them as a keyboard player.

The other instruments stop. The harpsichord keeps the bass and plays increasingly elaborate figures above it. The solo is written out in full in the score, down to its fastest notes, and the orchestra rests for sixty-five bars.

Bach gives the keyboard broken chords and rapid alternations of the kind a concerto would usually give to a solo violinist. In the unaccompanied cadenza the left hand plays the bass notes while the right hand moves above it.

At bar 219, after the long keyboard solo, the strings return with the ritornello in D major, with the violins in unison. The harpsichord goes back to accompanying, and the flute rests to the end, as it did at the opening.

The violin begins and the flute follows. Under their dotted phrases the harpsichord plays a walking bass line, then adds its right hand as a third melodic part. The accompanying strings rest for the whole movement.

On 24 March 1721 Bach dated the dedication of six concertos to Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg. Each concerto calls for a different group of players. This one sets a flute beside a violin and a harpsichord.

The earlier version of this concerto marks the movement Adagio. In the 1721 score for the Margrave, Bach changed the marking to Affettuoso (tenderly, with feeling).

The refrain moves to F♯ minor. The flute leads and the violin follows. When the harpsichord takes over, its right hand keeps the dotted rhythm and decorates it while the left hand continues underneath.

The refrain moves to G major. The flute leads again, and Bach alters the phrase before the harpsichord takes it over. The harpsichord’s passage that follows is the longest in the movement, with short interjections from flute and violin.

In 1703 the eighteen-year-old Bach spent about half a year as a violinist in Duke Johann Ernst III’s private orchestra at Weimar. Later that year he took the post of organist in Arnstadt.

Bach signed his contract at Köthen in August 1717. As Thomaskantor in Leipzig from 1723 he owed the churches a cantata every Sunday and feast day, about sixty a year. Prince Leopold still commissioned a birthday cantata from him each year.

The violin plays the first phrase again in B minor, and the flute follows as at the start. The harpsichord’s right-hand solo ends, and its bass part supports the last exchange and the closing chord.

The solo violin begins with a dotted figure followed by a run of triplets. The flute enters next, then the harpsichord. The movement is in two beats to the bar, and the three parts start to overlap.

After the close in D major, the middle section begins in B minor at bar 79, with the solo violin marked piano. The violin continues its triplets, and the same short figures now pass through minor keys. The harpsichord plays more running passages of its own.

In 1703 Bach played violin in Duke Johann Ernst III’s private orchestra at Weimar. He stayed for about half a year before he became an organist in Arnstadt.

The flute, violins, viola and bass instruments stop. For thirteen bars (bars 164–⁠176 in the Mutopia edition) the harpsichord plays alone, its two hands exchanging running figures. It is the longest passage in the movement for the harpsichord without the other instruments.

In 1852, more than a century after Bach’s death, C. F. Peters published the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto. It was performed at the Leipzig Gewandhaus the following year. The score used here descends from Wilhelm Rust’s edition of 1871.

The opening returns in D major, beginning with the solo violin. The flute and harpsichord follow in their original order. Bach repeats the whole outer section, and the strings again enter after the soloists.

The Advent Chamber Orchestra played this concerto last in a programme called Music of the Bach Family, given on 10 and 17 February 2008. Just before it, the orchestra’s flautist Constance Schoepflin played the flute concerto in G, Wq 169, by Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel.