Bach: Magnificat

The program booklet gives the following information about the work:

In its eventual form, the Ouverture No. 4 is an opulent achievement, calling for three trumpets and timpani in addition to three oboes, strings, and continuo. Bach makes cunning use of his forces, employing the woodwinds, the trumpets and timpani (working together), and the strings as essentially disparate groups sometimes playing in tandem and sometimes in very distinct opposition. Following the standard layout of an orchestral suite, this one opens with a French-style Ouverture in which oboes and strings wind in about each other in sustained lines. The trumpets and timpani add pomp and circumstance by superimposing sharply articulated punctuation over this harmonically dense writing. The meter breaks into triple time for the quick ensuing section, a rollicking gigue. This sprightly fugal expanse develops at considerable length through several episodes and then breaks into music that picks up the train of thought from the grand opening. Bach had followed established form by repeating his stately opening when he first presented it, and now he does the same with the second portion of the piece, which (to most intepreters) means revisiting the entire gigue-fugue and the grand closing music.

The suite continues through a selective series of stylized courtly dances: two bourrées, a gavotte, a pair of minuets. The two Bourrées (in rapid duple meter) are played in alternation but in a single expanse. The first of the pair leaps cheerfully, while the second is more mysterious, with the oboes’ tune being underscored by short, swirling figures in the strings; after that, the first Bourrée gets another go-round. A Gavotte follows, formal and foursquare. We proceed to a pair of triple-time Minuets, also in alternation, mirroring the structure encountered in the Bourrées. (Perhaps you perceive a general symmetry emerging in the layout of this suite.) Trumpets and timpani sit out this section, which yields a lighter texture of just woodwinds, strings, and continuo for Minuet I; and the instrumentation is reduced further for Minuet II, to merely strings and continuo. The concluding Réjouissance (Rejoicing) is not explicitly presented as a courtly dance, although it is certainly dance-like.