musica cubicularis:

Žiga Faganel: violin
Domen Marinčič: viol
Tomaž Sevšek: harpsichord

Bach's Birthday
Happy Birthday, Johann Sebastian!

For this year's European Day of Early Music, which is also the 330th Birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach, the musica cubicularis ensemble prepared a programme of Bach's music for violin, bass viol and harpsichord. Apart from sonatas with obbligato harpsichord and virtuoso solo pieces, they present two reconstructed trio sonatas for these instruments.

Artist message to visitors

Bach used the violin, the bass viol and the harpsichord in his chamber music making throughout his career. He is primarily known as a keyboard virtuoso, but found his first employment as a violinist in Weimar, later returning there as concertmaster. In Weimar he also composed for the viola da gamba, used it at the court in Cöthen – Prince Leopold is known to have played all three instruments – and appeared with viol players at public concerts of the Leipzig collegium musicum. Our programme thus includes works from all three most important stages of his career, each piece telling a different story: a tiring journey, the death of Bach's first wife, the lost sonatas, an unusual exercise in composition and a concert in a coffee house.

About the project

This programme brings together six very different works for a combination of instruments that was much used already by Bach's predecessors Buxtehude, Reincken, Krieger, Theile and others. The reconstructed trios BWV 528a and BWV 1038 will be presented in new versions with violin and viola da gamba. The former is based on the trio sonata in e minor for organ and seems to belong stylistically in Bach's middle Weimar period around the year 1714. Its recovery is extremely valuable since only two other chamber music works seem to have survived from this period, both written for violin and continuo. The sonata BWV 1038 is well known in a version for flute, violin and continuo preserved in Bach's own manuscript. The catalogue of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's estate published in Hamburg in 1790 mentions a trio for violin, viola and continuo supposedly written in collaboration with his father. Such a piece is otherwise unknown, but it appears that the trio sonata BWV 1038 is a transcription of the lost original. Its flute part shows signs of having been transposed an octave higher and the continuo part is identical to that of Bach's violin sonata BWV 1021. Johann Sebastian probably asked his son to incorporate the existing bass part in a new triosonata, possibly as a lesson in composition. The programme also includes two larger and stylistically more advanced works with obbligato harpsichord. The sonata with violin will be performed in a less-known version with the bass viol doubling the harpsichordist's left hand – this possibility is mentioned in one of the existing sources. Ensemble sonatas will be complemented by the early harpsichord Toccata in D major and the Prelude to the Partita in E major for solo violin which is one of Bach's most popular works. Bach himself must have thought highly of it, transcribing it for organ and orchestra and using it as an introduction in two cantatas. In the late 1730s he also transformed it in an independent piece for harpsichord or lute.