Cello Concerto

The cello version of this C minor concerto follows the viola original closely and has kept a place in teaching and in recital programmes, where it supplies an eighteenth-century-sounding concerto in a repertoire that has few of them. Its slow movement in particular has been recorded many times, and the work is usually announced as an early classical concerto by the London Bach.

It is not by Johann Christian Bach. The piece descends from the viola concerto published in the 1920s by Henri Casadesus, a French viola player who issued a series of works ascribed to eighteenth-century composers — among them Handel and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach — and who had composed them himself. The forgery was accepted for decades and had entered the teaching repertoire before the attribution was withdrawn. The row is kept under J. C. Bach because that is the name the work is known and programmed by.