Bach: 4 Concerti for Various Instruments - Orchestra of St. Luke's

At the time of his death in July 1750, J.S. Bach's unpublished works, including all of the concerti, were held by his two eldest sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel. These manuscripts, written almost entirely during his last period at Leipzig, were not considered valuable enough to mention in the specifications of his estate, which list was published in November 1750. In 1754, Emanuel Bach and Johann Agricola, composer and former pupil of Sebastian Bach, published an obituary of Bach for Mizler's Musikalische Bibliothek. That essay summarized what was then known or remembered about Bach's work. The two men mentioned "various concerti for one, two, three, and four harpsichords" but added that there was also "a mass of other instrumental pieces of all kinds and for all kinds of instruments." Two decades later, Johann Forkel, Bach's first great biographer, was gathering information from Emanuel Bach, and a small correspondence between them is extant. In one letter, dated 1775, Emanuel admits to "throwing together" the obituary and answers a large number of questions Forkel put to him but provides no new information about concerti. In 1802 Forkel's biography was published; again there was mention and analysis only of keyboard concerti. These compositions were the same Leipzig works mentioned earlier by Emanuel Bach and Agricola. It took more than 50 additional years for the editors of the first complete works to come to the remarkable conclusion that all, or at least most, of these harpsichord concerti (including those for two and three harpsichords) were arrangements by Bach from earlier compositions and that the Concerto for four harpsichords was by Vivaldi!