Sometimes we can accidentally sideline Bach into being an organist and composer of church music. However for a good portion of his life was devoted to the writing of instrumental and orchestral music, which can be seen in the accompaniments, sinfonias and overtures in his cantatas.
During his time at Weimar he’d studied and transcribed the works of Corelli and Vivaldi (c.1717), and at Köthen he’d composed the cello suites, violin partitas, and the Brandenburg Concerti (1721).
From 1724, newly settled in his position at Leipzig, and over the next fifteen years, Bach wrote the four Orchestral Suites – they weren’t composed as a set, compared with the Brandenburg Concerti.
Today’s choice is the second suite, which may have been originally composed for solo violin or oboe with strings and continuo, and then revised in 1739 for transverse flute (flauto traverso) in place of the solo violin. The flauto traverso goes across the body (like the modern flute), hence ‘traverso’, compared to the flûte à bec which is like the recorder (bec meaning beak, so the mouthpiece of the recorder looks like a beak).
The Suite has seven movements:
- Overture
- Rondeaux
- Sarabande
- Bourrée I and Bourrée II (played A B A)
- Polonaise and Double (played A B A)
- Menuet
- Badinerie
More often than not, you can work out the number of beats in a Baroque dance by the number of syllables in its name (Sarabande = 3, Menuet = 3, Badinerie = 4 or 2, Bourrée = 2, Gavotte = 2). The tricky one is Gigue, but as it’s pretty much the only one in compound time, you can break down the name into gi-gu-e for the three quaver beats, and it helps you remember how to spell it.
The Sarabande is in canon between solo and basso continuo, and the last movement found fame as a Nokia ring tone.
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