Disconcerting but often delightful new Bach transcriptions
Grade: B Everyone loves the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather fewer people love the sound of an unaccompanied organ, so a cottage industry has developed among conductors and composers, retrofitting Bach for full orchestra. From Elgar and Mahler to showman-maestros like Stokowski and Henry Wood, orchestral Bach transcriptions have tended towards the spectacular, and they annoy all the right people. When Wood arranged the D minor Toccata and Fugue for a super-sized orchestra, he pre-empted the backlash by crediting it to a fictional Russian modernist, ‘Paul Klenovsky’. The critics duly raved. Still, who knew that the late Sir Andrew Davis – the closest thing we had to a latter-day
