Vladimir Ashkenazy - Rachmaninov transcriptions

"Rachmaninov was, of course, both a great pianist and a great composer, and it is no surprise that, like Liszt before him, he was drawn to the art of transcribing others' music for his own instrument. It is no surprise, too, that like Liszt, Busoni, Godowsky, and a host of other pianist-composers, he turned his transcribing hand to the music of Bach, the most universal and diversely arranged of all composers. His arrangements of three movements from Bach's E major Partita for solo violin stamp the music firmly with his own fingerprints. Although he is faithful to the structure and spirit of the originals, there are numerous instantly recognisable Rachmaninov traits, most notably the chromaticism of the Preludio and the Gavotte. This transcription was one of Rachmaninov's last, composed in 1933

Schubert's songs have also been a happy hunting ground for transcribers, and both Liszt and Godowsky exploited the wealth of wonderful melodies to very different ends. Whereas Liszt dramatised and embellished, and Godowsky polyphonically enriched introducing complex contrapuntal ideas, Rachmaninov essentially chromaticised. His only Schubert song arrangement - "Wohin?" ("Where to?") from Die schöne Müllerin, transcribed in 1925 - is imaginatively decorative, almost obscuring the firmly diatonic melodic line with an ever-increasing labyrinth of chromatic embroidery.

One of the most famous of all Rachmaninov's transcriptions, the marvellous arrangement of Mendelssohn's Scherzo from A Midsummer Night's Dream, written in 1933, is particularly daunting for pianists. Rachmaninov captures the Mendelssohnian deftness of touch, and to convey such elfin lightness and filigree is a challenge to the performer. Bizet's Minuet from L'Arlésienne Suite No.1 was first arranged by Rachmaninov in September 1900, while he was undergoing the therapy from Dr Nikolai Dahl that enabled him to re-emerge into full creativity with his Second Piano Concerto; however, he made a second, pianistically leaner arrangement of the same piece over twenty years later (published in 1923), and it is this second transcription that is recorded here. Rachmaninov first performed his arrangement of Mussorgsky's Hopak from the opera Sorochintsy Fair in 1923, although he did not write it down until the following year. Rimsky-Korsakov's The Flight of the Bumblebee has been arranged for just about every conceivable instrument, but Rachmaninov's piano transcription is the most famous of all. It is pianistically demanding, of course, but again the scale of Rachmaninov's arrangement perfectly captures the spirit of the original

The transcription of Tchaikovsky's Lullaby, op.16 no.1, was the very last piece Rachmaninov wrote, dated 12 August 1941, shortly after the Germans invaded Russia and while the composer's thoughts were firmly with his homeland. He recorded this new arrangement during his final sessions for RCA in February 1942, and it is a fitting tribute to the composer who meant more to Rachmaninov that any other during his youth in Russia."

Rachmaninov Transcriptions is released this month. Click here for more information.
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Viktoria Mullova - Mozart: Violin Concertos Nos. 1, 3 & 4

Mozart's First Violin Concerto (K207) is also his first original concerto for any instrument. His earlier keyboard concertos had been based on material by other composers, but this work, completed in April 1773, is entirely the product of his own imagination. There are, however, few signs of compositional inexperience. At seventeen, Mozart had already written more than twenty symphonies and seven operas, and his ready grasp of the skills of structural clarity, effective orchestral writing and affecting lyrical invention are certainly on display here. The first movement is as buoyant as such a movement should be, the orchestra poised and formal and the soloist mixing graceful melody with more angular fast-note figuration, while the slow movement is a gentle adagio whose rich but placid air clearly owes something to Mozart's operatic experience. The finale is a dialogue between soloist and orchestra which bustles with violinistic athletics, and whose scampering main theme recalls the mood of mid-century concertos by Haydn.

The rest of Mozart's violin concertos were all composed in 1775, starting with the Second (K211), composed in June. Yet the most startling advance in artistic inspiration and identity occurs not between the first two concertos, but in the three months which separate the Second from the Third, K216, which was completed on 12 September. Suddenly, we are hearing the nineteen-year-old Mozart as we know him from the great piano concertos of the 1780s - elegant, witty, beguilingly changeable, and above all capable of writing music of surpassing beauty.

The first movement finds him in the rare act of borrowing material from another work, the opening orchestral section being based on an aria from his recent opera, Il re pastore, in which the main character sings of his love for the shepherd's lot, unaware that he is of royal blood. The implied mixture of nobility and carefree content could not be a more apt way of characterising the concerto movement. It is the slow movement, however, which has won this concerto a place in people's hearts. "An adagio that seems to have fallen straight from heaven" is how the Mozart scholar Alfred Einstein described it, and indeed this is a movement which exhibits to an outstanding degree that god-given talent for serene melodic perfection that was Mozart's alone. The nocturnal sound-world, too, is new to the violin concertos, with the orchestral strings muted and the oboes giving way to softer-toned flutes. The rondeau finale demonstrates another feature that was to colour many of Mozart's later concertos, namely a greater independence given to the wind section, who even have the work's final say. More noticeable, however, is the element of knowing skittishness which it introduces, nowhere more so than when, after the cheerful main theme has made its third appearance, orchestral pizzicatos accompany an exaggeratedly powdered French-style gavotte, and then a more rustic tune is heard with bagpipe-like drones from the soloist. Scholarship has revealed this tune to be a popular song of the day known as "The Strasbourger", and that this concerto is therefore the one which Mozart performed "like oil". The music lovers of Augsburg were fortunate indeed!

Lindsay Kemp