Concerto Budapest

Two keyboard concertos from Johann Sebastian Bach – with solo by the great pianist Dezső Ránki. This is the far-from-everyday temptation dangled in front of us in the first half of the concert, at the second recital of the season opening weekend by András Keller and Concerto Budapest. Like so many other Bach compositions, the 1055 in A major and the 1052 in D minor offer plenty of hard work for succeeding generations of musicologists, principally around the basic issue of what the solo instruments were originally for these two pieces. In the case of the A major concerto, for example, the prevailing (but by no means unanimous) view of Bach researchers is that the instrument in question was probably the oboe d’amore, and many give the violin the lead part in the D minor concerto, whereas there are others who place their vote on the organ. Similar philological questions on the subject of the form of the work and movement number also swirl around Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, commonly known as ‘Titan’. However, what is not in doubt is that the world premiere of the work was in Budapest in November 1889, and that a day before the recital, which received a lukewarm reception, the young composer scribbled a note of thanks to the musicians for their exertions on the headed paper of the Hungarian Royal Opera House.