Baroque Transcriptions – Hayk Melikyan

The transcriber’s art is a peculiar form of ventriloquism — the pianist speaks in another composer’s voice, or several voices at once, and if it works we forget entirely that a substitution has taken place. Hayk Melikyan, an Armenian pianist trained in the Russian tradition and now something of a specialist in this repertoire, understands the trick cold. His new disc for Azure Sky, following last year’s all-Bach outing, widens the net to the baroque at large — Handel, Marcello-via-Bach, and a shoal of arrangements old and new — and the results are, for the most part, quietly extraordinary.

Start with the Handel. “Lascia ch’io pianga,” that aria of almost unbearable stillness from Rinaldo, seems an unlikely candidate for the keyboard — how do you sustain a singer’s long breath on an instrument that can only decay? Melikyan’s answer is ingenious: a web of broken chords, harp-like, spun quietly beneath the tune, and then, for the da capo, a drop into the bass register that gives the piano its own kind of vocal chest tone. It shouldn’t work. It does.

He pairs it with Kempff’s transcription of the minuet in G minor — those tart little dissonances rubbed in just enough to sting, never enough to bruise — and here I’ll register a small quibble that any Kempff devotee will want aired. The chorale prelude listed as “Befiehl du deine Wege” is in fact BWV 270, the four-part chorale harmonization, not BWV 727, “Herzlich tut mich verlangen,” which is the organ chorale prelude “Kempff ”actually arranged. Same tune, different Bach entirely — it turns up famously (repeatedly, achingly) in the St. Matthew Passion — and the mislabeling matters more than it might seem, since one piece is Bach the four-square hymnodist and the other is Bach the melancholic organist reharmonizing memory itself. Melikyan plays the right notes. Someone at Azure Sky got the catalog wrong.

No such trouble with the Busoni. The “Adagio” extracted from the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C major — a rendition tradition that goes back at least to Myra Hess, who also preferred to let the adagio stand alone rather than drag listeners through the full architectural weight of the piece — unfolds here with real gravity, the chords voiced with an organist’s sense of registration even though there’s no organ in the room. And “Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland,” BWV 659, gets exactly the sonority it needs: dark, autumnal, the melody floating above an inner voice that never once loses its thread. The Shigeru Kawai instrument Melikyan plays throughout has a bloom in the tenor register that suits this repertoire uncommonly well — not the steely brilliance some Japanese pianos favor, but something rounder, more accommodating of Busoni’s harmonic fog.

The Siloti items are the disc’s real discovery, or rediscovery. Alexander Siloti — Rachmaninov’s cousin and, before that, a Liszt pupil of formidable pedigree — made dozens of these Bach arrangements, and they’ve languished in semi-obscurity for a century, eclipsed by Busoni’s more muscular, more “important” versions. Siloti’s are gentler, more intimate, closer to salon miniature than concert statement. In lesser hands they can sound thin. Melikyan doesn’t let them.

Four of the transcriptions are his own, all vocal originals repurposed for keyboard, and they’re the most persuasive evidence here of a pianist who thinks structurally rather than decoratively — he’s not just prettifying a tune, he’s finding the piece’s skeleton and re-clothing it in idiomatic piano figuration. Compare this to Kempff’s own compositional transcriptions, which sometimes betray the pianist-composer’s ego a little too plainly; Melikyan’s touch is lighter, more deferential to the source.

The Marcello-Bach “Adagio,” that oboe concerto slow movement that has seduced transcribers from Alkan to Zimerman, closes proceedings with the simplicity such pieces demand and rarely receive. No interpretive overreach. Just the tune, allowed to be sad.

Fifty-seven minutes, then, that never once feel padded or academic. Recorded at the Komitas Museum-Institute in Yerevan — an appropriately hushed, resonant space, faintly ecclesiastical in the reverb tail — this is a disc for late nights and headphones rather than casual background listening. Fix the Kempff attribution for the reprint, and I’d call it close to indispensable.