Bach beneath the lime trees by Loris Barrucand and Clément Geoffroy ECL2303E

 Official release on May the 31st. Special subscription price !

Benefit of our launch promotion : this new release plus a CD among a selection from our catalog for 25€

Free Shipment for European Union, United Kingdom and Switzerland.

“Tomorrow, Wednesday 17th June [1733], Bach’s Collegium Musicum will be resuming its activities in the garden at Zimmermann’s. [...] there will be a harpsichord of a kind that has never been heard here before; music lovers and virtuosos will have the pleasure of meeting one another there.”

Although we shall probably never know what this amazing harpsichord was like, we can imagine it being played by Bach, one of his sons, Carl Philipp, Wilhelm Friedemann, or a talented pupil such as Johann Ludwig Krebs. It was actually at this time that Johann Sebastian Bach’s harpsichord concertos were composed, and three concertos for two harpsichords, two concertos for three harpsichords and one concerto for four harpsichords have come down to us through the ages, giving some idea of what an incredible craze for the instrument there must have been! All of these works are highly atypical for the period, or even the only ones of their kind. It seems likely that they made a real impression on both listeners and performers given that all of Bach’s sons - and a number of his pupils - went on to compose for two harpsichords, making them the most prolific of all musical dynasties in this field.

Although we can see that concerts with three or four harpsichords must have been fairly unusual, it is hard to believe that they managed to get through more than six hundred concerts by performing just three works for two harpsichords! So what might the audience at the Grimma Gate or in the Katharinenstrasse have heard being performed?

The aim of this programme was to try to come up with an answer.

Clément Geoffroy