Bach Concerto in D minor Marcello BWV 974 Ayrton, Netherlands Bach Society

Bach arranged quite a lot of music by his Italian contemporaries. The concerto in D minor, originally written for oboe and strings by Alessandro Marcello (16731747), is one such arrangement. Alessandro was the elder brother of Benedetto, who was also a composer. The two brothers came from a noble Venetian family. Alessandro was an allrounder. He drew and painted, made globes, wrote poems and played several instruments. Following a visit to Italy in 1729, the French philosopher Montesquieu wrote disparagingly that Marcello was a kind of madman and a jackofalltrades for the semitalented. Talented or not, Marcellos oboe concerto was also in circulation in Northern Europe. The Duke of SaxeWeimar may have taken a manuscript of the work back to Weimar from the Low Countries in 1713. Bachs keyboard arrangement, here performed by Patrick Ayrton for All of Bach, turns a concerto that was already modest in stature into real living room music. But, as Ayrton says, Bachs approach to these arrangement