Bach is so closely identified as the glory of German music, eager to draw inspiration from other German masters like Bohm, Buxtehude, Reinken and Froberger, that his debt to Italian music is sometimes underestimated. So Olivier Baumont, in his scholarly booklet-note, is right to focus attention on this important aspect of Bach’s style. He had copied out by hand works by Frescobaldi and Bonporti, transcribed concertos by Albinoni, Torelli and Marcello, and written fugues on themes by Albinoni, Legrenzi and Corelli; but the most significant influence on him was Vivaldi, whose clean-cut melodic lines and motoric rhythm he adopted and absorbed. The practice of adapting concertos for use by keyboard without orchestra was by no means unique to Bach – according to Mattheson, it was common in Amsterdam, and several concertos by Handel and Corrette could be played as unaccompanied keyboard solos. Baumont suggests that the present Vivaldi transcriptions could be played either as they stand or (making allowances for those cases where Bach adopted a lower key) with Vivaldi’s original orchestral parts.
Longer and more complex than any of the Vivaldi violin transcriptions, Bach’s own ‘Concerto in the Italian taste’, here played on a copy of a Silbermann-type harpsichord of 1735 with a robust sonority and a particularly powerful bass register, is given a sturdy, no-nonsense reading with the tutti and solo lines well differentiated by contrasting registers – particularly illuminating in the final Presto, where they are commonly masked when played on the piano. Baumont’s playing of the seldom recorded concertos is rhythmically energetic (though with some occasional hurrying) and tonally solid; but at the risk of sounding ungrateful I have to say that except in the expressive Largo of BWV973 – the only time Vivaldi approaches the Italian Concerto’s sustained cantilena – lyricism is in short supply. As with previous recordings by Woolley and Bolton, the lasting impression overall is of how infinitely superior and more inventive Bach’s own concertos were to prove than Vivaldi’s often naive works.'