Music for fairs, celebrations and garden parties – “French-style” music sounding like Lully, for the Royals – by whom? J.S. Bach! Strange as it may be, this Bach is not as well known as the composer of sacred music, but is downright amazing! Here we have his Suite for orchestra no. 3 in D major BMW 1068, composed in Leipzig between 1729 and 1731, when he led the Collegium Musicum, a university group whose sparkling little orchestra played at the Caffé Zimmerman, in the town centre. In the Aria, the second movement, Bach leaves out the winds and uses only the strings, with a magical “suspended” effect. The piece immediately became famous. In the mid-1800s, the violinist August Wilhelmj, enchanted by its beauty, transcribed it for violin and piano, shifting it from D to C major and lowering it an octave so as to play it, with much vibrato, on the violin’s fourth string, its lowest, hence its title, Aria sulla quarta corda, which leaves little to doubt. The Swingle Singers in the 1960s also produced a magnificent rendering, which Piero Angela used as his theme motif on Italian Tv.
Another composer, another time – but still in dreamland… In 1816 Franz Schubert wrote his Symphony No. 5, a work of extraordinary imagination. Alongside romantic throbbing, the memory of Mozart can be heard in the background: “… like a distant echo I hear his magic melodies. Oh immortal! How many shafts of light have you shot into our souls!” So the Fifth seems to echo the marvellous Symphony no. 40 in G minor K. 550, especially in the Allegro – gentle but agile, combining formal perfection with crystal-clear themes. Then there’s the Andante, with its gallant flavour. The Minuet offers almost a direct quotation from Mozart, and the Trio is a rustic, naïf Ländler.
The Allegro, radiantly good-willed, takes us back to another of his maestros in pectore: Franz Joseph Haydn. But here we have the source of inspiration in front of us – Mozart’s K. 550. It only takes a few bars of the beguiling Allegro molto to pick us up in a whirlwind, the theme whisking along animated figures, but blending well with the softer second element. Then we are emotionally caught up in the development, stiffened by bolts of sound. The melancholy expressiveness of the Andante then gives way to the Minuet, with the robust dance atmosphere of a Viennese Ländler, and the Trio is nostalgic.
The glowing Finale is permeated by a frenetic vital spirit that seems to submerge everything else, and you could even suspect that unpredictable rascal Don Giovanni is hovering in the background.

Marino Mora