The E-Concert is entitled Early Music and the Baroque Era and contains two parts. The first part is Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 by Johann Sebastian Bach. It is performed by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra. The second part is The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi. The performer of this part is Nigel Kennedy. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 and Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons combine the main achievements of the Baroque era with innovations of genius composers.
Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 consists of three movements, the first and the third of which are entitled Allegro, while the second one is Affettuoso. It is written in concerto grosso format, which means that the extracts written for the entire ensemble are alternated with the solo or soloist group extracts. The instruments used in the concert are harpsichord, flute, and violin, complementing one another in a harmonic ensemble, which is accompanied by the orchestra.
The first movement of the concerto is rather prolonged and is remarkable for its cadenza of a harpsichord when all the instruments stop playing and allow it to play alone. The harpsichord solo lasts for about four minutes. The teamwork of the ensemble is amazing, but the solo part impressed me greatly with its refined moves. This cadenza at the end of the first movement provides the opportunity to single out the individual features of this instrument and pay more attention to them in the further performance of the entire ensemble. Bach changes the speed of the music within the concerto. Some episodes of the first movement are so slow that they seem to lull the listeners.
Not changing the mood, the beginning of the second movement is slow as well, it is entitled Affettuoso. “This title, together with the character of the music, invokes the new gallant style promoted by the circle of musicians in Berlin” (Fabian 183). The style of Afettuoso is characteristic of the Baroque period. This movement consists of separate solo episodes of the instruments. It is like dividing the whole into separate elements. Flute, violin and harpsichord are changed by one another in chain.
The third movement includes the elements of fugue. It means that one and the same theme is repeated in different parts of the movement. The subject of the movement is developed; new motifs are added to it gradually. But the main theme is aimed at linking different episodes of the movement. It appears unexpectedly after the soloist parts and seems to redirect the listeners to the previous parts of the movement in particular and the concerto in general. The main characteristic feature of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 is alteration of the solo and ensemble parts, dictated by the concerto grosso format.
The Four Seasons by Vivaldi consists of four violin concertos, each of them representing a season of the year and revealing the author’s mood and impressions from beauty of nature. The style of the concertos varies and the main aim of the composer is to compare and contrast the inner and outer weather caused by the natural phenomena of every season.
Vivaldi associated each concerto with a different season of the year by its title and by the insertion of lines of poetry in the orchestral score… Instrumental works associated by the composer with non-musical ideas are known as program music and were popular during the nineteenth century (Hoffer, p. 123).
The primary goal of the composer was to illuminate the chosen themes and the choice of techniques was sidelined. Vivaldi tries to reflect the natural phenomena in music, for example singing of birds at the end of the Spring Concerto and the sounds resembling thunderstorm in the Summer Concerto. “Vivaldi was a pioneer in the descriptive form of composition. His prime goal was to describe in music as literally as possible personal reactions to the aesthetic of nature” (Knight 39). The sonnets preceding the concertos create the necessary mood and direct the listeners’ imagination in the necessary direction. It helps to prevent the unexpected and misleading associations of the audience and to realize the initial composer’s purpose. The Spring Concerto demonstrates the awakening nature. The streams are flowing, the birds are singing, most of the sounds are clear and resonant. This circumstance presupposes the composer’s choice of the tonality.
The Summer Concerto is tenser, its tempo and contour mirror the business of the season, the high speed of life and its changeability. The buzzing sounds added to the melody remind the bees flying from one flower to another. The climax of the concerto is the thunderstorm at the end. It seems to interrupt the melody, to drown other sounds and put an end to the Concerto.
Listening to the Fall Concerto, I imagined hunt and harvesting due to the ceremonial manner of presentation of the episodes. The Winter Concerto contrasts the warmth at the fire inside of the house and cold outside the house. It is reflected in different parts of the Concerto. Vivaldi’s choice of techniques for his The Four Seasons was aimed at revealing the person’s emotions at observing the beauty of nature.
Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 and The Four Seasons by Vivaldi were innovative for their time. The most popular trends of the Baroque era are complemented by the personal contributions of Bach and Vivaldi in these works, such as Bach’s variations of the concerto grosso format and Vivaldi’s descriptive form of composition.
Works Cited
- Fabian, Dorottya. Bach Performance Practice, 1945 – 1975: A Comprehensive Review of Sound Recordings and Literature. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003. Print.
- Hoffer, Charles. Music Listening Today+ Resource Center Printed Access Card. Boston: Cengage Learning, 2010. Print.
- Knight, David B. Landscapes in Music: Space, Place, and Time in the World’s Great Music. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2006. Print.