During his employ at Weimar in the early part of his career, and at the behest of Prince Johann Ernst, Johann Sebastian Bach completed several transcriptions for solo keyboard instruments of concertos originally written for various solo instruments with ensemble accompaniment. This series included four concertos arranged for organ (cataloged as BWV 592, 593, 594, and 596) and 16 for harpsichord (BWV 972-987), the latter set including at least six by Italian master Antonio Vivaldi. It is to this group that the work under consideration here—the Concerto for solo keyboard in F major No. 7 (BWV 978)—belongs. Bach based the Concerto No. 7 on Vivaldi's Violin Concerto (RV 310), Op. 3/3, from the famous collection L'estro armonico. This collection was published in two volumes in 1711 in Amsterdam, where Prince Johann Ernst, a student at the Univesity of Utrecht at the time, probably encountered it during his studies and travels. (The Prince had heard the organist at Amsterdam's Nieuwe Kirke, Jan Jacob de Graaf, perform his own keyboard transcriptions of some Italian concertos and subsequently collected several manuscripts and publications of concertos to take back to Bach at Weimar.) Bach altered the key from Vivaldi's original G major to F major, but beyond that left the original structure more or less intact. The work is cast in the standard three movements, with a moderately fast opening movement and a fast finale framing a Largo middle movement. Like Bach's other transcriptions based on concertos from Vivaldi's Op. 3, (BWV 972, 976), this work seems to translate relatively smoothly from its original instrumentation (with solo violin) to harpsichord. While in some of the Vivaldi transcriptions (such as BWV 973 and 975, based on Vivaldi's RV 299 and 316, respectively), Bach must adapt certain flashy gestures idiomatic to the violin for performance at the keyboard. One observes in the works drawn from L'estro armonico an emphasis on clarity of line and variety of harmony, with less attention to fingerboard acrobatics. In the opening movement, for example, there seems to be too little time and too much linear momentum for excessive ornamentation, while the D minor second movement relies on the starkness of the repeated chords and chromatic lines, rather than rhapsodic show, for its expression. The quick triple meter and lively solo/tutti exchanges of the final movement likewise propel the piece toward its conclusion.

© Jeremy Grimshaw, All Music Guide