The piece is from a Concerto Grosso, a form popular in the Baroque period. It displays the typical format of the ripieno (the orchestra), playing against a smaller group of instruments (the concertino)- here, the violin and two flutes. Into the piece is written two echo flutes ("flauti d'echo"), which is quite mysterious, because we today don't know of an instrument that this could refer to. In the piece is written a main violin, but also a first violin; another of the pieces mysteries.The full concerto was transcribed into a harpsichord concerto. The concerto is one of 6, the "Six Concerts a plusieurs instruments". Bach presented them to Christian Ludwig in 1721, although they were probably composed well before then.
This piece is for all strings, continuo and two flauti d'echo. It is in G major and is in compound time (3/8). It is also at a lively tempo (Allegro). The piece begins with chords making up a perfect cadence being played by all the string parts and continuo, and the flutes playing a duet of arpeggios and sustained notes. Then the note lengths get shorter (bar 13), with semiquavers and quavers added in, the 1st violin sounding out above the other parts, at a higher pitch, or in unison with the flutes. At about 3:00, the violin part becomes heavily ornamented and it plays extremely fast patterns, generally based around scales. Sometimes the flutes have a solo part, and they play the melody line. Even though the violin part seems to be so much more complex than the flute parts, in actual fact the parts that the flutes play are advanced for the time; violins would always have had much more complex parts anyway. The flutes' part becomes more complex, however, whilst the violin accompanies them. The piece occasionally comes back to the cadential chords that there was at the start.
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