Transcriptions

Thursday

Richard Bratby

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

Thursday

Alan Rusbridger

Alan Rusbridger on the joys of four-hand piano

One of the few social activities not yet prohibited under lockdown laws is four-handed piano playing. I don’t mean sitting side-by-side at one keyboard. That would risk infection and, if snitched on, the possibility of sharing a prison cell with Piers Corbyn. No, the four hands must be divided equally across two pianos, and the instruments must be end-to-end. Safely isolated in this manner — perhaps three or four metres apart — the ivories can be tickled for as long as you want. I’ve been a devoted four-hand piano player all my life — due entirely to the limitations of the two I was born with. On one keyboard I