Bach Suite No. 2 for Flute and Strings in B Minor, BWV 1067

Suite No. 2 for Flute and Strings in B Minor, BWV 1067

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

The greater part of Johann Sebastian Bach’s instrumental music (concerti, suites, music for harpsichord, violin, cello) is believed to have been composed during a period of six years (1717-23) when Bach was employed at the small court of Cothen. For the only time in his life freed from the weary task of composing and presiding over the performance of church music, Bach poured out a great flood of instrumental music, including the famous Brandenburg Concertos, and the four great suites for orchestra. While Vivaldi and Telemann composed greater quantities of orchestral music (600 concertos and many hundreds of suites, respectively), Bach’s more select catalogue of works in these forms stand as the supreme orchestral achievement of the Baroque age.

Of the suites numbers two and three are the best-known. The second, in B Minor, with its scoring for solo flute with strings and continuo, takes on a somewhat “concerto-like” character, especially in the quick movements, where the solo instruments is given opportunities for virtuoso display.

In common with Baroque suites, the opening movement is the longest and weightiest. Derived from French opera, it is in fact an “ouverture”, comprising a grand, ceremonial slow introduction followed by a sharply contrasted, lengthy, tightly-constructed fugue in quick tempo. The solo flute only begins to emerge as a soloist in the more transparent “fugal episodes, ” which provide contrast.

The subsequent movements are all of a “binary” (two-part) construction, each segment repeated, and all derived from the traditional French court dances which had crept into concert music by way of opera. (This came about through the practice of French composers extracting from their stage works the introductory “overture, ” and various dances which had been used for ballet episodes, stringing them together to form an orchestral “suite.”)

These range from the graceful “Rondeau, ” to a grave and majestic “Sarabande” (a slow dance with roots in Spanish music), a pair of Bourrees (the second given over to the solo flute, followed by a reprise of the first bourree), a stately Polonaise (despite its name, not terribly “Polish, ” in fact!), with a “double” (or variation), giving the flute its most elaborate solo passagework, a gliding Minuet, and a witty, breathless “Badinerie.” (The name “Badinerie” can be loosely translated as “horseplay” – in this case one of Bach’s most genial, high-spirited movements. Always a consummate craftsman, in the Sarabande movement Bach composes an impressive “canonic” movement, in which the melody (in flute and violins) is imitated a bar later in the bass (cellos and basses).

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