Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 as concerto grosso: the first, third and sixth of these concertos have however no concertino versus orchestra distinction. The concerto grosso was a Roman invention, typically featuring two violins and a cello as concertino, with a string orchestra of multiple string instruments per part. Venetian composers seemed slow in adopting the genre, and as Bach and his German contemporaries rather turned to Venetian music they may have been hardly aware of it. The fifth "Brandenburg Concerto" seems intended to be performed with one instrument per part, as to not overpower the harpsichord with its relatively restrained volume, and was not
Brandenburg-Schwedt Brandenburg-Schwedt Brandenburg-Schwedt was a secundogeniture of the Hohenzollern margraves of Brandenburg, established by Prince Philip William who took his residence at Schwedt Castle in 1689. By appanage, they administered the manors of Schwedt and Vierraden on the Oder river (Uckermark and Neumark) as well as Wildenbruch in Pomerania (present-day Swobnica, Poland). Though prosperous, the cadet branch never obtained Imperial immediacy. Because of a lack of money in the late days of the disastrous Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the "Great Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg in about 1640 mortgaged the Schwedt region to the Baltic German noble Gustav Adolf von (Varrensback,