Transcriptions Piano

I spend part of every summer at the Aspen Music Festival, at least partly because it's where one can easily hear a lot of young musicians, some of them still students, who are the cream of the crop. It's there that I heard, when they were very young, musicians like Yo-Yo Ma, Midori, Sarah Chang, Yefim Bronfman, Itzhak Perlman, Joseph Kalichstein, Ian Hobson and many others. I've been amazed, repeatedly, at the quality of youngsters coming up. An embarrassment of riches, one would have to say. And it's hard to keep track of them.

Nikolai Demidenko's large-scale pianism suits Busoni's Bach transcriptions to a tee. Listen first to the E minor prelude; you sense that Demidenko truly revels in the music's declamatory syntax and booming bass lines. Part of this may have to do with the pianist's Fazioli concert grand, whose resonance cuts like a saber wrapped in a velvet cloak. Demidenko sculpts fluid paragraphs out of the D major fugue's superficially repetitious sequences, and takes the hybrid Fantasia, Adagio, and Fugue at a brisk, vehement clip. The pianist forges an effortless link between the unfinished fugue's last measures and Busoni's unmistakably crabbed conclusion.

German pianist Holger Groschopp has emerged as something of a specialist in the voluminous body of transcriptions by Ferruccio Busoni. The most famous of these are treatments of Bach's music, but he also wrote arrangements and reworkings of Mozart, Liszt, and many other composers. This is a new recording of Bach transcriptions, made in 2011. Busoni's transcriptions are often heard singly on recital albums, but there's a lot to be said for hearing them in large groups, even for hearing the two CDs' worth here. It gets into the range of treatments Busoni applied, from massive Mahlerian attempts to encompass the world of the organ on piano, to studies in chromatic harmony, to quiet reverential treatments.

The concept of “Der Wanderer” (the wanderer) had a lifelong fascination for Franz Schubert. The idea of an eternal journey towards happiness or a better life, albeit unattainable, was close to his romantic heart. The same may be said of Franz Liszt, who, mutatis mutandis, shared Schubert’s wanderings and quest for an ideal. No wonder that Liszt was one of the first to recognize Schubert’s genius, playing his works in his concerts and transcribing songs for piano solo.

Unlike many piano arrangements, all these pieces have been arranged by the composers themselves for four hands. The Piano Duo Trenkner-Speidel presents these arrangements in authentic interpretations on a sonorous Steinway concert grand piano from 1901. Evelinde Trenkner and Sontraud Speidel have recorded a whole series of CDs on MDG exhibiting their perfect symbiosis.

In 1931 the pianist and muse Harriet Cohen invited all her principal composer friends each to make an arrangement of a work by J S Bach for inclusion in an album to be published by Oxford University Press. Published as A Bach Book for Harriet Cohen, it is recorded here for the first time by virtuoso pianist Jonathan Plowright. The disc is completed by eight other 20th century British Bach transcriptions.

A pianist’s dream: a rare and precious testament of a great pianist’s vision (Busoni) of another’s (Liszt) work. Very popular repertoire in extremely rare versions. Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) was one of the most gifted pianists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as being a composer of considerable importance and vision. A child prodigy, he debuted at the age of 12, being quickly marked out as a piano virtuoso unlike any other. His reputation for many years rested on his remarkable transcriptions of J.S Bach, which tended to overshadow both his original compositions and his other transcriptions.