Bach writ large for orchestra might be likened to a tourist’s view of the Vatican. Regular worshippers tend to be a little more blase. And yet Bach orchestrators, like tour guides, need to know what they’re dealing with. Leopold Stokowski was one who certainly did, but I get the feeling that Esa-Pekka Salonen is less than comfortable with Stokowski’s D minor Toccata and Fugue. The opening Toccata could be tighter, the various ritardandos more comfortably negotiated. Schoenberg’s St Anne Prelude and Fugue works rather better – the actual playing is admirably smooth – but turn to Erich Kleiber’s 1930 Berlin recording and what had previously sounded over-fussy emerges as part of a carefully calculated grand plan. Salonen’s St Anne suggests a modernist’s severe aesthetic, with pert phrasing and a reluctance to bask, whereas by allowing the score some extra elbow room (as opposed to extra playing time) Kleiber brings new-found logic to Schoenberg’s analytical orchestration.
Salonen’s Elgar (the Fantasia and Fugue, misleadingly referred to by me in our October issue as a Prelude and Fugue) is, again, extremely beautiful, especially in its opening pages. Leonard Slatkin’s recent BBC Phil recording (10/00) claims more in the way of Elgarian pathos, but switch to the Fugue with the Old Man himself in charge and you’re in another world. This is fuguing for King and Country, with no holds barred and a chest-swelling peroration. Webern’s exquisitely voiced ‘Ricercar’ shares with Salonen’s Schoenberg and Stokowski some less-than-natural tempo changes, but Stokowski’s Little Fugue and Mahler’s Suite are generally first-rate.
The Mahler is a real education, in that we’re dealing with a great composer whose primary motive was more to delineate and clarify than to glorify his own ego in Gothic terms. Arrangements from Bach’s Second and Third Orchestral Suites centre more on dynamic shading than new-found colours. Even the Badinerie’s bassoon and pizzicatos sound authentic, and the Air’s string lines benefit from a gently augmented staccato accompaniment. Salonen’s is as fine a performance as I have heard, certainly on disc, though I’d like to think that Riccardo Chailly will bring his even more chaste interpretation to CD before too long.
The chief attraction of Biddulph’s set is in its vivid evocation of period, the way it allows us to listen with yesterday’s ears. Dimitri Mitropoulos’s lofty transformation of the G minor Fantasia and Fugue is, for me, its central jewel, a raging maelstrom that calms in the prelude for a descending sequence that could easily be by Bruckner. Otto Klemperer’s simple transcriptions are sincerely played, but ‘Bist du bei mir’ is spoiled by a rather plodding accompaniment.
It’s fascinating to compare Alois Melichar’s fiery and functional Toccata and Fugue with the garishly coloured version under Sir Henry Wood (very different to Stokowski’s), and a joy to encounter Sir Malcolm Sargent’s warming orchestral version of the Third Suite’s ‘Air’. Albert Coates conducts Heinrich Esser’s fairly uneventful F major Organ Toccata, said to incorporate Elgar’s ‘alternative ending’, which seems to add little, save for some extra brass (and volume).
Frederick Stock makes a more palatable blend of the St Anne than Schoenberg does, and Toscanini’s 1939 broadcast of Respighi’s rabble-rousing Passacaglia and Fugue has greater flexibility (and inflectional variety) than the head- strong 1947 version recently put out by Naxos. Orchestrations by Schmidt-Isserstedt (Italian Concerto) and Damrosch (Sixth Cello Suite’s Gavotte) are hail and hearty in the Beecham manner (the point is well made in Edward Johnson’s excellent notes), which means they’re more colourful than perceptive.
As to the rest, Stoky lays on the rouge for the arioso from Cantata No 156 (ie, the slow movement of the Fifth Clavier Concerto), Reiner directs a lusty Great Fugue (arr Caillet) and Koussevitzky revels in Pick-Mangiagalli’s lavish re-working of the Prelude from the Third unaccompanied Violin Partita. Barbirolli’s Sheep May Safely Graze (‘Schafe konnen sicher weiden’) is much as you’d expect it to be, kindly and tranquil, and there are chorales or chorale preludes by Schoenberg (under Horenstein), O’Connell (under Ormandy) and Vittorio Gui.
All are occasional worshippers who parade Bach in his Sunday best, leaving the Real Thing for weekdays when most people (ie, those who perform Bach straight) are back at work. Or at least that’s how it seems to me. It’s an anachronism worth witnessing, especially in such convincing performances and in transfers (by Mark Obert-Thorn) that are truly state- of-the-art. If you’re really serious about Bach orchestral transcriptions, then this should be your first port of call, with Slatkin’s Chandos CD as your second.
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