When music scholars began sifting through Bach’s long-forgotten works in the nineteenth century, they came across four orchestral masterpieces that they catalogued as “orchestral suites” because of their similarity to suites for keyboard or individual string instruments—and simply to avoid confusion. Bach, however, had called them “ouvertures” in the tradition of his German contemporaries, who used the term for an orchestral work consisting of an overture and several dance movements in the French style.

Bach most likely wrote his Third Orchestral Suite around 1731 in Leipzig where he was music director at the University of Leipzig, director of the Collegium Musicum, Kantor of the Thomasschule, music overseer at four major churches, and composer of  music for all these entities. Though he may have composed some of the orchestral suites earlier, the earliest existing copies date from Bach’s Leipzig days, so we can assume he performed all of them there with the Collegium Musicum.

The Third Suite may be the most famous of the four on account of its sublime Air. One of the most popular and arranged pieces of all time, it achieved special notoriety through August Wilhelmj’s version for the violin G string (1871). This afternoon our four cellists play the arrangement by the Finckel Cello Quartet. The Air’s binary form—two halves, each repeated—and its “stepping” bass overlaid with a long, sustained melodic line are standard Baroque procedures, but its poignant effect transcends all formulas.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe