Bach Transcriptions For Piano

Description

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) Transcriptions for Piano by Saint-Sa?½ns Siloti Reger d'Albert KabalevskyPiano transcriptions at one time had a place of the greatest importance in the dissemination of music, before the days of recordings and the growth of interest in period instruments and fidelity to the original composer's supposed intentions. Until relatively recently arrangements of orchestral music for piano duet or two pianos, or even for three players, was commonplace, particularly in an age when every household had its piano. Transcription, of course, predates the nineteenth-century popularity of the piano and Bach himself wrote keyboard transcriptions of a series of concertos by contemporary composers such as Vivaldi, Alessandro Marcello, Telemann and even the talented young Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar. Arrangements of this kind offer a further insight into the works on which they are based.If Johann Sebastian Bach was both a master of the keyboard, the harpsichord, the clavichord and the organ, and of transcription, then his own music has proved an interesting field for exploration by later arrangers and transcribers, writing, in particular, for the piano in a way that can reflect the grandeur of the organ in pianistic terms, fill out the implied harmonies of works for unaccompanied violin or cello and expand the range of the relatively limited clavichord and harpsichord.Bach won early distinction as an organist and was employed in this capacity at Weimar until 1717, when he became Court Kapellmeister to the young Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cothen, an enthusiastic amateur. In 1723, after the Prince's marriage to a woman that Bach described as amusica, he moved to a position of less social significance as Cantor at the Choir School of St Thomas in Leipzig, where, for the rest of his life, he remained responsible for music in the principal city churches, employed by the town council.The first transcription included is of the opening Sinfonia to the cantata 'Wir danken dir Gott' (We thank thee, God), BWV 29, written for performance on 27 August 1731 for the inauguration of the Leipzig town council. The movement has its origin in the Preludio to the E major Partita for Solo Violin and was used again by Bach in a wedding cantata of 1729 and in the cantata from which Saint-Sa?½ns made the transcription here included. Camille Saint-Sa?½ns himself, born in Paris in 1835, was a musician of the greatest versatility, much respected in his time, although by the time of his death in 1921 musical fashions had changed. His own musical taste had brought a keen interest in the music of Bach and he was instrumental in the revival of the latter's works that was taking place. Even as a child he had made a strong impression as a pianist and for many years he served as organist at the Madeleine. Among his transcriptions are arrangements of movements from Bach's cantatas, dedi