Bach The Two Violin Concertos, Double Concerto & Concerto for Violin and Oboe

Bach was director of court music at Weimar, when, in the summer of 1713, he first set eyes on the solo concertos of Vivaldi. It was through the editions of the Amsterdam printer and publisher, Estienne Roger, that he became familiar with these in their time revolutionary compositions. During a journey to the Netherlands, Bach’s employer, the young Count Johann Ernst, had purchased the scores in Roger’s shop as part of a copious stack of new compositions. Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, characterises this encounter with Vivaldi as marking a crucial moment in Bach’s creative development, and, citing Bach’s oldest son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, as his source, goes as far as to assert that it was as a result of it that Bach began to think ‘musically.