Mostly Transcriptions is a CD released last November featuring solo piano performances by the Sacramento-based Tien Hsieh. Almost all of the tracks on the recording provide a variety of approaches to the art of the transcription. When Earl Wild chose to call his Carnegie Hall recital in the fall of 1981 (subsequently released as a live recording) The Art of the Transcription, each of the eleven works on his program was the product of a different transcriber. Mostly Transcriptions on the other hand, examines the work of transcriptions by two composers in their own right, Franz Liszt and Ferruccio Busoni. The “source composers” for the transcriptions are Johann Sebastian Bach, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Frédéric Chopin. However, it is worth recognizing that Liszt’s Venezia e Napoli can also be classified as transcription, even if his indigenous sources are far less well-known.
When Hsieh gave a “mostly transcriptions” recital last month in San Francisco, I took it as an opportunity to address what distinguished Busoni from Liszt, since she played transcriptions of both of these composers of Bach compositions. I tried to make the following case:
One might say that Busoni had made it his mission to promote greater interest in Bach, while Liszt was primarily concerned with promoting greater interest in Liszt.
Today we are more likely to remember Busoni for his Bach scholarship than for his original compositions; and the same attention to detail that informed Busoni’s performing editions of Bach’s single-manual keyboard compositions served him just as well in transcribing Bach’s organ works. On the Mostly Transcriptions CD his efforts are represented by the BWV 564 C major toccata in three movements, the opening toccata, an adagio, and a fugue. Busoni was less interested in evoking the organ through the piano keyboard than he was in taking all that prodigious counterpoint than crossed over multiple manuals and a set of pedals and recasting it for a piano with a judiciously applied damper pedal. Presumably, he did this because he just wanted to play more Bach at the piano.
Hsieh’s interpretation of Busoni’s transcription shows just as much respect for Bach as Busoni did. Her approach to phrasing and dynamics is characteristically nineteenth-century; but that is what we should expect of a reading of Busoni. The piano for this recording was a Fazioli F278 (9’ 2”) on which each key could be controlled with impeccable clarity; and, while the rhetoric may have been nineteenth-century, not one note was out of place in Bach’s conception of the underlying grammar and logic.
Liszt was another matter. He is represented by the BWV 542 G minor fantasy and fugue. This was more an account of the notes as Bach had written them, executed with a healthy serving of Liszt’s pianism but without the interpretative appreciation of Bach-the-organ-composer that we encounter in the Busoni transcription. Ultimately, Liszt seems more at home in his transcriptions of the art song repertoire of Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin. Here his talent captures the interplay between voice and accompaniment and renders it all through two hands on a single keyboard. One cannot always sing along with Liszt’s song transcriptions; but one can always identify where the singer resides, even when his pianism is at its most flamboyant. Hsieh clearly appreciates this side of Liszt’s talent, and it emerges clearly in each of her performances. The same can be said of her approach to the three movements of Venezia e Napoli, even if Liszt was not as explicit about his underlying sources, most of which were again vocal.
There is one track on the CD that is decidedly not a transcription. This is “Elegy (for Giampaolo),” composed by Glen Cortese in 2008. It was composed as a memorial piece for Cortese’s first composition teacher at the Manhattan School of Music, Giampaolo Bracali. This might seem a bit out of place unless we recall that the musical elegy constitutes a major place in Busoni’s repertoire of original compositions. Cortese’s compositional voice differs significantly from Busoni’s, but this composition demonstrates that the nature of the musical elegy is as significant for him as it had been for Busoni.
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