The 10 best Baroque tracks of all time
Baroque
A bass line with numbers under it, a soloist above, and the invention of the idea that a piece should be driven by harmony moving somewhere. Also the invention of opera, the concerto and the fugue, which is a fair century and a half of work.
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Johann Sebastian Bach / Goldberg Variations
Thirty variations over a bass line, returning at the end to the aria unchanged. Glenn Gould recorded it twice, at opposite tempos, twenty-six years apart, and both are right.
Johann Sebastian Bach / Mass in B minor
Assembled at the end of his life from music written across four decades, for a liturgy his own church did not use. The largest single achievement in Western music, put together from parts.
Henry Purcell / Dido and Aeneas
Dido's Lament is five descending chromatic notes repeated eleven times while a woman decides to die. The most economical devastation anyone has written.
Antonio Vivaldi / The Four Seasons
Worn smooth by four hundred years of use, and still startling if you read the sonnets printed alongside it — barking dogs, drunk peasants, ice underfoot. Programme music before the term existed.
George Frideric Handel / Messiah
Written in twenty-four days, to a libretto assembled entirely from scripture, for a Dublin charity. Handel wrote for the theatre and it shows in the best possible way.
Claudio Monteverdi / L'Orfeo
Not the first opera and the first good one. Monteverdi works out in a single evening that an orchestra can characterise, and the form never looks back.
Gregorio Allegri / Miserere mei, Deus
The Sistine Chapel forbade copies for over a century, until the fourteen- year-old Mozart heard it twice and wrote it out from memory. The high C is probably a transcription error, and nobody wants it corrected.
Johann Sebastian Bach / Brandenburg Concerto No. 3
Nine string players, no soloist, and every one of them busy. Bach sent the set to a margrave who appears never to have had them played, which is the most Bach fact available.
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber / Rosary Sonatas
Each sonata retunes the violin differently, so the player's fingers produce intervals they are not expecting. Devotional music that is also a physical ordeal, and it sounds like it.
Johann Pachelbel / Canon in D
Two bars of bass, twenty-eight repetitions, three violins in strict canon above. Ubiquitous to the point of parody, and structurally the ancestor of every loop-based record on this site.