This Listening Club course offers an opportunity to explore the wonderful Brandenburg Concertos of Johann Sebastian Bach in the form of a six-part series of recorded lectures.

As a court employee in Cöthen in his mid thirties, Bach sent a beautiful handwritten score of these concertos to the aristocratic Margrave of Brandenburg as a thinly-disguised job application, but never received a reply.

The Margrave’s loss is our gain; the Brandenburg Concertos are amongst Bach’s best-loved compositions – tuneful, imaginative, brilliant and fun.

The Listening Club series consists of three hours of recorded material, made up of an introduction and six films, one for each of the Brandenburgs, lasting between 25 and 35 minutes each. Sandy explores the context behind the concertos, helps us to follow the score along with the music, and offers three important points to focus on in each session. The Academy of Ancient Music has kindly made its 2009 recording available for us.

By the end of the course you will have learned about some of the most important techniques Bach used in his instrumental music, become accustomed to following the scores while listening to the music, and will have gained a fresh understanding of this masterpiece of eighteenth-century music.

Click here to watch a sample of the series.

In addition to the six recorded lectures, the course also includes access to the recording of a live Zoom discussion in which participants discussed the music and asked questions relating to the content of the course.