Featured Album October 2025: Ensemble Odyssee "Original & Counterfeit"

Released in August, the new album by Ensemble Odyssee focusses on reimagining music by J S Bach. The ensemble present four Bach concertos in new arrangements, highlighting different solo instruments and framing this repertoire as it's not been heard before, continuing a tradition set by the composer himself to revisit and revise earlier works. Their first release for Challenge Classics, Original & Counterfeit is a fitting demonstration of the ensemble's virtuosity as arrangers and performers. Read on to find out more...

Original & Counterfeit
Ensemble Odyssee

Johann Sebastian Bach: Concertos after BWV 1052, 1053, 1056 & 1057

OUR FEATURED ALBUM FOR OCTOBER 2025

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From the artist's press release:

The fact that three of these concertos (BWV 1054, 1057, and 1058) are arrangements of earlier violin concertos composed in Köthen (BWV 1042, 1049, and 1041) has led scholars to suspect that the remaining concertos are also adaptations of lost works for strings or winds, prompting several musicologists to attempt reconstructions.

In 2016, Christoph Wolff suggested that the Concertos in D Minor and in E Major (BWV 1052 and 1053) are not transcriptions of lost violin concertos, as previously assumed, but rather harpsichord versions of organ concertos. The presence of violin-like figurations does not necessarily indicate a lost violin version. Similar patterns appear in other Bach keyboard works and were likely influenced by his experience transcribing Vivaldi. If Wolff’s hypothesis is correct, then no lost concertos need to be reconstructed: they simply never existed. This idea served as Ensemble Odyssee's starting point. Rather than attempting to reconstruct lost works through musicological speculation, they asked themselves: what would Bach have done if he had to perform one of these pieces again and wished to showcase a different solo instrument?

A key source of inspiration was the Concerto in F Major (BWV 1057), which Bach transcribed from the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto (BWV 1049). Not only did he transpose it down a whole tone (likely to accommodate the range of the harpsichord available to him at the time), but he also made substantial changes. He reorganized the musical material so thoroughly that it can be considered an “improved” version of the original.

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Why The Early Music Shop loves "Original & Counterfeit":

The Amsterdam-based Ensemble Odyssee is, by its own admission, ‘dedicated to pushing the boundaries of artistic creativity through cutting-edge musicological research’. That’s quite a tall order, but this new CD of music by Johann Sebastian Bach fulfils that mission statement in spades.

Transcribing and adapting already-existing music is not new: it was commonplace in the baroque-era. Bach himself, as every composer of his time, was adept at re-imagining his own music and that of other composers. Two of Bach’s most celebrated large-scale choral works – the Christmas Oratorio and Mass in B minor – are what are known as ‘parody’ compositions, i.e. most the individual movements have been re-worked from other sources, in the case of the oratorio, secular cantatas. And Bach was fascinated by, and learned from, the concertos of Italian masters such as Vivaldi, several of whose violin concertos he adapted for solo organ, as a means of his mastering the Italian style.

The fact that three of Bach’s harpsichord concertos are arrangements of earlier violin concertos led musicologists for decades to believe that the remaining concertos were also adaptations of lost works for strings or winds. However, recent research has shown that they are more likely to be arrangements of earlier keyboard works. This new CD from Ensemble Odyssee takes as its starting point a question: what would Bach have done if he had to perform one of these pieces again and wished to showcase a different solo instrument? To answer this question three members of Ensemble Odyssee have created brand-new arrangements, showcased alongside the Leipzig master’s own arrangement of his Fourth Brandenburg Concerto, featuring a pair of recorders and jettisoning the Brandenburg’s violin for a solo harpsichord.

Recorder-player Anna Stegmann’s arrangement of BWV 1053, in E flat is well-suited to the fourth-flute, a recorder pitched in B flat. Her flexibility of tone and virtuosic passage work is exemplary in this delightful piece. Violinist Eva Saladin makes light work of her contribution, an arrangement of BWV 1052 in D minor, based on earlier sources of the concerto. Oboist Georg Fritz makes a strong case for BWV 1056, whose second movement is in any case familiar as the Sinfonia of the sacred cantata BWV 156.

The one-to-a-part instrumentation creates a slightly fragile quality to the overall sound but the resultant clarity pays dividends for Bach’s writing. There’s no doubting the players’ delight in the music, the execution of which is constantly fresh and idiomatic.

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Original & Counterfeit is available from The Early Music Shop online or in-store at our Snape Maltings showroom!