Now in the fourth year since its re-establishment, Bath’s Bachfest continues to flourish, with the programming making it all the more rewarding. In the Academy of Ancient Music’s concert, Bojan Čičić and Rebecca Livermore were the engaging soloists in Bach’s D minor Concerto for Two Violins, BWV 1043. Čičić was then joined by flautist Rachel Brown and harpsichordist Nicholas Parle in the Triple Concerto in A minor, BWV 1044, whose final movement vies with the Fifth Brandenburg Concerto for virtuosity. Tellingly contrasted were the Suite No 3 in D, BWV 1068 – famous for its Air and unassumingly delivered here – and the Overture in G minor, once attributed to JS Bach, but possibly the work of his son Wilhelm Friedemann. Contrapuntal writing was evident, but it was the hallmarks of the new galant style – resolutely avoided by Bach senior – that revealed the gulf between the two generations.
In the score of Bach’s late, unfinished work The Art of Fugue, his second son, Carl Philipp Emanuel, printed the text of the chorale prelude Vor Deinen Thron Tret Ich Hiermit at the point where the Contrapunctus XIV breaks off. Angela Hewitt performed this piece with clarity. Her way of finding the melodic path through Bach’s vast musical forest, with its knotty undergrowth, allowed the listener to experience the expressive nature of a work once assumed to be a thorny technical exercise to be endured rather than enjoyed.
The stile Francese of Contrapunctus VI matched the opening of Suite No 3 for dotted-note felicities, while Hewitt’s slower tempi conferred a sense of calm and airy beauty.
