Bach Transcriptions for Piano by Angelika Nebel

Bach transcriptions for piano occupy a strange, contested territory — somewhere between scholarship and sentiment, between the concert hall and the parlor. The question isn’t whether they’re legitimate. It’s whether they’re necessary.

Angelika Nebel doesn’t waste time on that argument. She simply plays.

And that, it turns out, is the right answer. This recital — titled “Metamorphosis,” which is either apt or pretentious depending on your mood — gathers a dozen-odd arrangements spanning roughly 150 years of pianists and composers who couldn’t leave Bach alone. Walter Braunfels, Carl Tausig, Vaughan Williams, Isidore Philipp, and several figures whose names won’t appear in any standard reference work: all of them took something Bach wrote for organ, for flute, for orchestra, for a king’s amusement, and asked what it might become under ten fingers on a Steinway. The results are uneven in ambition and uneven in craft. What keeps them together is Nebel’s playing, which is consistently finer than the occasion perhaps demands.

Start with what works best. Tausig’s arrangement of “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde gross” — the great chorale prelude from the Orgelbüchlein, BWV 622, which Bach marked adagissimo and which carries the most elaborately ornamented soprano line in all of organ literature — is, on any strict accounting, a violation. The piece breathes through the registration of a tracker organ, through the way a sustained tone swells imperceptibly on a well-voiced pipe. The piano can’t do that. Tausig knew it and didn’t care. His version redistributes the ornamental line across the keyboard with a lushness that is frankly Romantic, openly sentimental, and somehow — against all odds — moving. Nebel plays it as if she wrote it herself. The rubato is slight but telling. The voicing is immaculate. You hear the chorale melody float above a texture of extraordinary delicacy, and you think: well, yes. This is luminous. What more do you want?

Quite a lot, actually, if you’re the sort of listener who finds Stokowski’s Bach transcriptions morally troubling. But even the sternest historicist might soften before the Vaughan Williams arrangement of “Ach bleib bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ” — brief, almost austere, with none of the English composer’s characteristic modal languor, just a clean, chorale-textured setting that respects the original’s simplicity and adds almost nothing. It sounds like something Vaughan Williams dashed off on a Sunday afternoon and meant primarily for himself.

The six-voice Ricercar from A Musical Offering is another matter entirely. Malheiro Prado’s transcription doesn’t try to hide its ambitions — this is a near-orchestral treatment of what may be the most harmonically dense and structurally ambitious contrapuntal piece Bach ever wrote, the one he reportedly improvised for Frederick the Great in 1747 on a theme the king handed him, a modulating chromatic subject that could have been designed specifically to embarrass anyone who tried to play it on the spot. Bach didn’t improvise this version, of course. He went home, wrote it out in six real voices, had it engraved, and sent it to Potsdam with a cover letter of such elaborate irony that scholars are still arguing about what he actually meant. The piece is almost unplayable on the piano in any honest sense. Nebel plays it anyway, with a kind of grim authority, the inner voices articulated with remarkable clarity, the texture never muddy even at its most dense. Whether the piano is the right instrument for this music is a question you can set aside for the duration. She makes you listen.

Not everything lands so well. The Prelude and Fugue in a — in Braunfels’s arrangement — feels slightly inflated, as if Braunfels couldn’t resist thickening textures that Bach left deliberately spare. The “Pastoralsymphonie” from the Christmas Oratorio, in Clarence Lucas’s transcription, is pleasant enough — the pastoral siciliano rhythm translates naturally to the piano — but it’s slight, the kind of piece that fills time at a recital without quite justifying its presence. And the brief chorale prelude “Ach wie nichtig, ach wie flüchtig” in Igor Iljin’s arrangement comes and goes so quickly that you’ve barely registered it before Nebel is already somewhere else.

The booklet notes are adequate — earnest, detailed, occasionally given to the sort of enthusiasm that produces sentences like “this arrangement reveals a new Bach,” which is the kind of thing that makes critics reach for their pencils. There is no new Bach. There is only Bach, refracted through different instruments, different centuries, different needs. What Nebel offers here is a particular refraction — warm, technically accomplished, sometimes genuinely illuminating.

She plays everything with tonal beauty and structural intelligence. You might disagree with the project. You won’t disagree with the pianist.