Harpsichord Concerto No. 2 in E major
Six of the eight solo harpsichord concertos that survive in Bach’s opus are contained in a 1738 manuscript from Leipzig, where they are thought to have been performed in the collegium concerts. Nearly all of the movements in these works are adaptations of previous works from the Köthen period, in this case thought to be from a lost oboe concerto. Bach used each of the movements of this work in cantatas as well, employing his ability to adapt a composition to the need at hand. For the harpsichord concerto, he reduced the scope of activity of the string section to allow the fullness of the delicate instrument to be clearly heard. The first movement, based on Bach’s favorite three-neighbor-note motive, is unusual in the number of recurrences in the tonic key of the opening ritornello,. A rather surprizing complete restatement of the theme follows a half measure adagio approximately two-thirds of the way through the movement. A delicately chromatic exploration of the lilting siciliano theme in the second movement by the harpsichord is accompanied by delicately throbbing strings, and perhaps forshadows the empfindsamer or “sensitive” style, later developed by Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel. While the third movement is based on an arpeggio theme rather than the neighbor-note theme of the first, and the movement is in a triple rather than a quadruple meter, the ritornello-solo structure is nearly identical, right down to the recurrence of the ritornello in the tonic key, again just before the two-thirds point. The parallels between the movements causes one to ponder whether Bach intentionally structured these two movements to reflect the proportion of the golden mean, the ratio of perfection of slightly less than two-thirds and known since the time of the Greeks, and also present in this work in the ratio of the first two movements to the whole, of course, dependent on the performance tempo.
