Luogo e data di registrazione		Hervormde Kerk, Bennebroek (Holland) - 9/12 Ottobre 1963
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Wolf Erichson
	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9458-A (Stereo) - AWT 9458-A (Mono) | 1 LP - durata 41' 30" | (p) 1964 | ANA Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SCA 25022-T/1-5 | 5 LPs - durata 212' 39" | (c) 1972 | ANA | (Sämtliche Cembalokonzerte)
	Edizione CD		Teldec Classics | LC 3706 | 8.35778 XD | 3 CDs - durata 76' 42" - 72' 00" - 63' 57" | (c) 1989 | ADD | (Sämtliche Cembalokonzerte)
	Cover		-
	Note		"Hofmusik in ismaning", aus dem Gemälde von Peter Jakob Horemans (Original in Bayerischen Nationalmuseum, München).

Bach’s two concertos for three harpsichords have long been widely known and admired by music lovers - already in 1840, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Hiller performed the D minor Concerto at the Leipzig Gewandhaus with acclaim. Seldom, however, in this past century and a quarter have the concertos been heard in a manner at all closely resembling their composer’s intention. Until recently, the convergence of three harpsichords was in itself a rarity, and even today the assembling of three individual and authentic instruments of ‘equal strength is most unusual, although vitally essential to the proper balance of the work. The present recording employs three very similar but not identical harpsichords which, unlike most modern instruments, reproduce the full resonance and quality of tone usual in Bach’s day. They are complemented not by a modern string orchestra, but by a small complement of soloists, whose Baroque instruments blend, or occasionally sing out, but never enshroud with a heavy mantle of vibrato sound the clarity and brilliance of the solo parts. The addition of a fourth harpsichord for the continuo, declared necessary by certain German scholars, is unjustified and superfluous in these concertos. In the few figured bass passages (second movement of the C major) the continuo function may be divided among the three keyboards, at the discretion of the performers. More problematic is the division of parts in the second movement of the D minor. Here the beautifully lilting melody, in the rhythm of a siciliano, has come down to us scored for violin doubled - or rather quadrupled - by all three harpsichords, whose parts are pedantically identical in the tuttis. Such heavy-handed doubling is most un-Bachian, and even if this piece is not his, would be puzzling in a work otherwise of such quality. It is hardly surprising to learn that this movement has been preserved not in an autograph, but only in copies made long after Bach’s death. Probably the doubling was the work of an unimaginative copyist no longer accustomed to continuo practice. This recording restores the melody to the violin and an accompanying role to the harpsichords. The man to whom we owe the most authentic copy of these two concertos was Johann Gottfried Palschau (1741-1813), a keyboard player and composer born in Hamburg, who travelled to Riga, studied there with Bach’s well-known pupil, Müthel, and settled in Petersburg. We might well imagine that he obtained copies of the concertos from Müthel, and that therefore the ascription to J. S. Bach is to be accepted. No scholar has yet brought forth credible evidence to the contrary. It is all the more remarkable, then, to find that Palschau omits the alla siciliana movement from his otherwise careful copy. It is not only the doubling which makes this movement dubious. The bel canto cadential figures are the work of a German with sympathies for Italian opera (more Handelian than Bachian), and the form - 8-bar tutti, 8-bar solo, 24-bar tutti, 24-bar solo, cadenza - is very unlike Bach’s sicilianas or other slow movements. Could it have been written by Wilhelm Friedemann, whose concerto for two harpsichords long passed for the work of his father? We can never be certain. Nor shall we ever know whether these concertos were original compositions or transcriptions. Prof. Schering felt the C major must have originally been written for three violins, because of solo passages where the left hands are doubled, the right hands varied. However; the opposite is also occasionally true, and the extraordinary sound of measures 80-85 of the first movement, with its independently arpeggiated bass lines in the solo left hands, would be quite impossible in another medium. In the last movement of the D minor, moreover, the unusually long, driving sequence of the first harpsichord would be unthinkable on anything but a keyboard: the upper line alone covers a range of three and a half octaves of unbroken sixteenths. At the end of the autograph manuscript of Bach’s seventh Harpsichord Concerto is the beginning of an eighth. After nine measures, just when the solo is to enter, the fragment ends. The loss of the rest, after such a tantalizing opening, has given rise to the lamentations of Bach scholars - and to the remarkable reconstruction by Gustav Leonhardt here recorded. The nine measures correspond with the opening of Cantata 35, “Geist und Seele wird verwirret” (1726), though Bach has dropped the second oboe and the taille. Moreover, in the fourth measure he has drastically altered the theme by adding syncopations and upward scalar sweeps, an intensification which astounds us as a stroke of genius and surely indicates that the concerto followed the cantata (though Spitta, II, 278, strangely assumed the opposite). Leonhardt has revised the instrumental parts of the cantata along the lines indicated by the fragment and, with the obligato organ part as a basis, invented an idiomatic harpsichord part as Bach, or another 18th-century performer, might have done. Inasmuch as the Seconda Parte of the same cantata is opened by another instrumental Sinfonia with organ solo, it seems likely that this would have formed the last movement of the concerto. The orchestral parts are practically unaltered in Leonhardt’s version. Spitta’s notion that the opening da capo aria for alto would have served as middle movement seems untenable, most obviously for formal reasons. For lack of a full-length movement, Leonhardt has improvised a prelude to an orchestral Phrygian cadence, parallel to that in the Third Brandenburg Concerto. The most likely use for harpsichord concertos in Bach’s Leipzig activities would have been the weekly meetings of the Collegium Musicum founded by Telemann and taken over by Bach in 1729. It is pleasant to think of him presiding at the Friday evening sessions, where Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee-house on Catherinenstrasse would have been jammed full of harpsichords and - one hopes - some appreciative coffee-drinking students. As Bach’s secretary enticingly wrote to a friend in 1739, “...he will begin the Collegium Musicum this Friday, and will perform some music in the first week of the Fair for the birthday of His Royal Majesty. It will certainly be worth listening to.” Alan S. Curtis