Another pointless arrangement/transcription?

[cloughie]

Important point in RB's first sentence. In my teens, browsing the music section of our public library in Falmouth, i came across the score of a transcription (maybe by Liszt) of LvB 7 for eight hands!. I wonder how that got there: being remote from London and other muscial centres, Falmouth would likely have hosted a fiery quartet of pianists bringing that symphony to the benighted Corrnish folks . (And there's that story of Liszt dancing to it while Brahms played!)

I have been castigated before on these boards for my low opinion of Liszt's music: but I agree with Richard about his transcriptions, too few of which I know. I love his transcription of Schubert's song Staendchen, in which he beautifully weaves together the vocal and piano lines, to the extent that it almost transcends the original.

I serendipitously heard in a New York Bookshop c1974 Isao Tomita's album Snowflakes are Dancing, transcriptions of Debussy for Moog synthesizer and Mellotron. Bizarrely, this was the first time I had heard the Debussy pieces in any form - and so bought it there and then - and now I like the originals, but can kind of hear the Tomita behind the piano sound when I hear the original.

I know exactly what you mean - that Tomita recording stay, as far as I can hear, true to Debussy’s notes and 46 years on I still listen to it frequently.
On Brass arrangements I think there are some excellent ones - PJBE on Elgar Howarth’s arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pics and the Weill Dreigroschenopfer Suite are top notch.

[ardcarp]

Did anyone hear Rudolf Barshai's string re-modelling of the first movement of Ravel's String Quartet today on Sunday Morning? Had it been an original composition, I might have thought 'Pleasnat and easy on the ear'. But what a travesty of the Ravel, which, along with Debussy's is one of my favourite SQs. Afterwards, my only thought was 'Why?'

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000qb40

About 1hr 20mins from start.

[Bryn]

Did anyone hear Rudolf Barshai's string re-modelling of the first movement of Ravel's String Quartet today on Sunday Morning? Had it been an original composition, I might have thought 'Pleasnat and easy on the ear'. But what a travesty of the Ravel, which, along with Debussy's is one of my favourite SQs. Afterwards, my only thought was 'Why?'

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000qb40

About 1hr 20mins from start.

I was wndering when someone would raise the matter.

[Richard Barrett]

I have been castigated before on these boards for my low opinion of Liszt's music: but I agree with Richard about his transcriptions, too few of which I know. I love his transcription of Schubert's song Staendchen, in which he beautifully weaves together the vocal and piano lines, to the extent that it almost transcends the original.

You'd probably like his other Schubert transcriptions as well. I'm not as much of a piano connoisseur as some people here, but I think Marc-André Hamelin's disc of Paganini Etudes and Schubert Marches is very much worth hearing, and the same pianist also has a complete recording of Leopold Godowsky's supercharged versions of Chopn's Etudes which somehow (like your experience with Tomita/Debussy, which I also had!) I got to know before the originals.

Mention of Tomita and Godowsky makes me think that maybe one way of judging whether a particular transcription is valuable or "pointless" is to ask oneself how much if anything it adds to the original, on balance, aside from making it available for performing resources (or, in the past, audiences) it wouldn't otherwise reach. I'm not sure whether very many if any piano transcriptions of orchestral music would really pass that test as far as I'm concerned.