Saturday "Building Bach Better" slot: a reconstructed Violin Concerto in D minor (BWV 1052).

I usually use the expression "Building Bach Better" as a play on words because every politician in the English-speaking world from President Elect Biden through Boris and the New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern down to foot-soldiers like myself seems to be using "Building Back Better" as slogan. 

On this occasion this Bach piece really has been rebuilt. 

Just as the orchestral piece usually called the "Albinoni Adagio" was actually written by Remo Giazotto, allegedly from a fragment of an original Albinoni piece which Giazotto claimed survived the allied bombing of Dresden. the concerto below is also a reconstruction. But the provenance of this one is rather clearer. 

We know that Bach composed a Violin Concerto in D minor which was regarded as so difficult to play that few soloists were able to tackle it. Too few, probably, as not a shred of it has survived. 

The concerto played here is a modern reconstruction, based on a harpsichord concerto written much later by Bach, but which is believed to be a transposition of one of his own earlier violin concertos. So basically it has been reverse engineered!

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