Bach Transcriptions – Gelber and Weissenberg

Bach transcribed for piano is always, in some sense, an act of confession — the arranger tells you what he thinks the music is really about, stripped of its original garb, and the choices made say as much about Busoni or Liszt or Saint-Saëns as they do about Leipzig. EMI’s Redline reissue throws two very different confessions at us, recorded nearly a decade apart but joined now under one bargain-bin roof, and the pairing turns out to be more instructive than the packaging — which buries the actual disc dates in the fine print — would have you believe.

Bruno Leonardo Gelber made his contribution first, in 1967, in the Salle Wagram, and the piano captured there has a brightness that edges, at louder dynamics, into something almost splintery — not ugly exactly, but thin where you want bloom. Gelber was barely into his thirties. He plays like it. The Busoni Chaconne, that Everest of the transcription literature, gets dispatched with a kind of restless haste that keeps undercutting its own argument; Busoni built the piece as an edifice, each variation a story added to the tower, and Gelber seems more interested in getting to the top than in the brickwork along the way. Tempos lurch forward at moments that cry out for breadth. There’s little sense of the chaconne as passacaglia-descended ritual, that inexorable tread Busoni inherited from the solo violin original and then monumentalized for ten fingers and eighty-eight keys.

He fares better in smaller rooms. “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” suits him — there’s less space for willfulness, and the chorale’s plainness seems to settle him down. “Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland” wants more nobility than he gives it, a kind of patrician hush that Busoni’s own recordings (what little survives, secondhand, in piano-roll evidence and the testimony of those who heard him) suggest was central to his conception. Gelber’s version is merely correct. The Sinfonia from Cantata No. 29, in Saint-Saëns’s sunny recasting, suits his temperament far better — here the extroversion that undermines the Chaconne becomes an asset, and the Busoni arrangement of the Prelude and Fugue in D major, BWV 532, gets a reading of real dash, bells-and-brass grandeur intact.

Alexis Weissenberg’s sessions, laid down in 1972 and 1973 for the old HMV ASD2971, are simply on another plane — and this despite a career built, famously, on a cooler, more controlled public persona than Gelber’s. Weissenberg’s Chaconne has the thing Gelber’s lacks: architecture. You hear him thinking in paragraphs, not sentences. The climactic D-major episode, with its arpeggiated chords ringing like cathedral bells, doesn’t arrive as a surprise but as destination — prepared, inevitable, the way Busoni surely intended when he reimagined Bach’s solo-violin monument as a pianistic Gesamtkunstwerk fit for his own touring recitals alongside Liszt’s B minor Sonata.

The real revelations, though, are the encore-sized pieces nobody remembers until they’re played well. Weissenberg’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” tosses aside the hushed, devotional Myra Hess manner — her own arrangement, let’s not forget, became virtually trademarked by her wartime National Gallery concerts — in favor of something more muscular, more swept-along, building to a crest and receding with real dynamic shape rather than mere pious murmur. Some will find it insufficiently reverent. I find it alive. “Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein” has terrific left-hand snap, almost a dance quality under the counterpoint. The Liszt arrangement of the Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543 — Liszt being, typically, less interested in fidelity than in opportunity — gets playing of real virtuosic flair without tipping into empty display. And the Siloti B minor Prelude, taken unhurried, slower than you’d expect, proves the opposite of indulgent: time seems to stop in the room, the overtones of the Salle Wagram’s instrument allowed to decay fully before the next phrase begins.

He closes with the Busoni Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565 — the most over-exposed organ work in the repertoire, arranged by the one pianist-composer bold enough to think he could out-organ the organ — and plays it with fire and unimpeachable technical command, octaves clean, pedaling judicious rather than swampy.

Does the reissue need to exist? That’s a fair question. Weissenberg admirers already possessing the HMV original gain only the three Gelber-duplicated pieces, hardly worth the purchase on their own; nobody will trade Weissenberg’s versions for Gelber’s. But heard cold, without the baggage of comparison shopping, this makes a satisfying hour-plus of Bach-through-other-hands, a reminder of an age when pianists felt no embarrassment borrowing Bach’s materials and rebuilding them in Lisztian or Busonian stone. Weissenberg carries the disc. Gelber is the makeweight — occasionally charming, finally dispensable.