One of our white whales at the Token Creek Festival has been our long unfinished complete Bach Brandenburg cycle, lacking the first. Since our complete late Haydn Trio cycle has many units missing, we decided to close out the Bach sequence this summer, and at the same time touch base with Corelli and Handel, two composers inexcusably missing from our festival repertoire. These three composers share some vocabulary elements but five seconds of music from any of them and you have a distinctive scent, gait, apparel, and wig size.

The Handel Concerto Op. 3/6 is thought to have had, at least in one of its early performances a middle movement. No one is sure what it was, and recent presentations of the piece have borrowed interludes from Handel operas, improvised, or observed a silence. We will come up with something.