Bach - in a new articulation?

Johann Sebastian Bach's harpsichord concertos are famous and can also be played well without accompanying strings. In addition, they are all arrangements of concertos that are also known with other solo instruments: the Concerto in D major is better known as the Violin Concerto in E major.

The new edition of the study score and piano reduction is not based in its musical text and preface on Bach's autograph score, but on its facsimile, edited by Christoph Wolff (Bärenreiter), who in turn relies, more or less explicitly, on earlier research by Werner Breig (Bärenreiter), who had edited the concertos in the New Bach Edition (Bärenreiter). Even the editors of the new Henle edition have to admit in the "Remarks" - in a rather hidden way - that they actually owe their knowledge to Breig.

Their reading differs from earlier editions above all in that they pretend to be more precise than their predecessors with Bach's flippant notation of the slurs, but nevertheless have to admit that they do not know it that precisely either. In view of Bach's sketchy and inconsistent use of legato slurs, they cannot. Therefore, as an interpreter, one only needs to know that the unsystematically thrown slurs here only illustrate a grouping that is already inherent in the notation in beams of four, and that the differences between the intervals in Bach's time ultimately determined their articulation - loosely based on Leopold Mozart (1756, 4th main piece, § 29): The small intervals must usually be tied. The larger they are, the more they should be "performed separately". Fine differentiations are important, "pleasant alternation."

Johann Sebastian Bach: Harpsichord Concerto No. 3 in D major BWV 1054, edited by Maren Minuth and Norbert Müllemann; piano reduction by Johannes Umbreit: HN 1382, € 17.50; study score: HN 7382, € 11.50; G. Henle, Munich