Bach Violin Concerto in A Minor BWV 1041: Transcribed For Cello
Here is the sheet music (and some audio play-along accompaniments) for a cello transcription of J.S. Bach‘s Violin Concerto in A Minor BWV 1041. Because the original key has been conserved, all standard accompaniment parts (piano or orchestral) can be used. These are downloadable for free from imslp.org. All of the play-along orchestral accompaniments are courtesy of JRV Violin Studio and their YouTube channel.
Bach’s original handwritten manuscripts (of the solo violin and orchestral parts, not the full score) survive for this concerto, unlike for his other two violin concertos (E Major BWV 1042 and Double Concerto BWV 1043). Our source for the cellofun Literal Urtext Transcription was a mixture of the Barenreiter “Urtext” Edition and Bach’s original manuscripts. While the Barenreiter edition normally seems to accurately reflect Bach’s manuscript (available on imslp.org), at some (many) moments it is perhaps too decisively in favour of articulating triplet groups as 2 slurred + one separate when Bach’s (often quite ambiguous) slurs do not always seem to indicate this.
For example, in the Barenreiter “Urtext” edition, every one of the 208 triplet eighth-note figures in the third movement is given the same, uniform, unvarying, ultra-predictable bowing/articulation of two slurred plus one separate:
The same, identical problem occurs in the second movement with the many triplet groups.
FIRST MOVEMENT: (Allegro?)
There is no tempo marking for this movement in the earliest available manuscript copies.
Here is a downloadable play-along “orchestral” accompaniment. A one-bar introduction has been added to give us both the speed and our entry.
And here is a home recording of the transcriber playing this movement with the above accompaniment:
SECOND MOVEMENT (Andante):
We will definitely feel the tempo as an eight-pulse per bar andante (walking speed). It would be tempting to renotate this movement in “double-time”, with each note notated twice as long and double the number of bars.
Here is a downloadable play-along “orchestral” accompaniment:
And here is a home recording of the transcriber playing this movement with the above accompaniment:
THIRD MOVEMENT
We have entirely rewritten Bach’s long upside-down string crossing passage from bar 105 till 117. This passage uses/requires the violin’s open E-string, which we obviously don’t have. This transcriber certainly can find no way to finger this passage successfully.
When faced with passages like this, we would normally take the key down a fifth in order to be able to play the problematic passage in exactly the same way as it is played on the violin, using the cello’s open A-string.
But taking the entire concerto down a fifth would bring it so low that it would be right out of the “concerto register”. Rather than risking this, the following “solution” is proposed:
Although we lose the magical, freaky, beautiful upside-down string-crossing effect, this alternative doesn’t sound out of place because it replicates the figuration of bars 82, 84, 86, and 87. We maintain the E pedal note (one octave lower than we would like) in all bars except for the second bar of this passage (because in that bar there seems to be no way to finger it with the E pedal).
The doublestop at the beginning of bar 94 has been removed and the chord in bar 90 has been revoiced.
Here is a downloadable play-along “orchestral” accompaniment. A one-bar introduction has been added to give us both the speed and our entry.
And here is a home recording of the transcriber playing this movement with the above accompaniment: