Johann Sebastian Bach

            One of the signal achievements of the music of the Baroque era was inauguration of the concerto.  The fundamental principle of the genre is the contrasting of a soloist, a group of soloists, or even two or more groups of musicians with each other during the course of a composition.  Almost every significant composer of...

        In the history of the arts, as in all fields of human endeavor, there often come times in which momentous changes occur in a relatively short period. And that is certainly the case in the years surrounding the end of the 1500s, for this period saw the beginning of most of what is familiar to today’s concert audiences. Before about 1600 (give or take a...

            In May of 1747, only three years before his death, Bach made a visit to the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia, the renowned “philosopher king,” at his sumptuous summer palace in Potsdam, Sanssouci.  Bach’s son, C.P.E. Bach, an eminent musician in his own right, of a more modern style, was a court musician there. ...

        There are two great collections of instrumental ensemble music by Bach, one being the Brandenburg Concertos, and the other being the four orchestra suites, or as Bach called them, “ouvertures.” The latter were not composed as a set of four, but stem from various years, and perhaps various places of origin. Bach referred to them as “ouvertures” because...

        The marvelous resources of the nineteenth-century symphony orchestra serve the broadest musical imaginative purposes with amazing facility. Although the twentieth century added a broad array of percussion instruments, the fundamental sound resources of the orchestra were in place by around 1850. During the 1800s the instrumental colors available in the orchestra grew...