Bach: Keyboard Concerto in D Minor, BWV 1052 (Bahrami, Dinnerstein)
When you mention Bach’s masterpieces, it’s usually the very big (St Matthew Passion; Bm Mass) or very contrapuntal (WTC; AoF) works that spring to mind. But this concerto – all its 20 minutes of not-particularly-contrapuntal music – also numbers among Bach’s best works. The BWV 1052 is one of the finest examples of ritornello form. In it, a repeated section of music, the ritornello (literally “a little thing which returns”) alternates with freer episodes.
The ritornello recurs in various keys, often in highly compressed or fragmented form, and its restatement in the home key usually heralds the close of the piece. The first and last movements of the BWV 1052 are in this form – the ritornello is the material played in union at the beginning of both movements. Bach fully exploits the opportunities of the form, using the ritornelli to anchor movements awash with key changes (if you ignore a bit of episodic messiness, the first movement goes Dm-Am-F-Am-Em-Am-C-Gm-Dm-Bb-Dm, and the last isn't too different). Bach also superimposes an A-B-A’ structure on both outer movements by introducing some gorgeous toccata-like contrasting material in the middle sections (2:11 and 14:36).
He also toys cleverly with ritornello form: at 6:02, what you'd expect to be the final ritornello appears, only to be interrupted by yet another episode of perfidia. Similarly, in the last movement we return to the ritornello in the right key (17:48), but are quickly cut off by a massive episode culminating in a cadenza before we finally hear the closing ritornello. It’s exactly the kind of bold structural delaying device we’ve come to associate with Beethoven (and others after him), and it’s interesting that Bach’s musical intuition led him to similar ideas much earlier.
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