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 (1673-1747), 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 all-rounder. 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 jack-of-all-trades for the semi-talented”. Talented or not, Marcello’s oboe concerto was also in circulation in Northern Europe. The Duke of Saxe-Weimar may have taken a manuscript of the work back to Weimar from the Low Countries in 1713. Bach’s 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, Bach’s approach to these arrangements was