I never thought someone can orchestrate a Bach organ work and let it sound truly great, but i was wrong! The orchestration is so detailed and lively, and i love the horn writing and minimal but effective use of mallets/ percussion! Master Bach and Master Schoenberg united!
I think Im gonna make every person who tells me Schonberg is not a good composer listen to this. It is much better than any transcription by Stokowsky.. and even Elgar's (who I ladore) transcriptions
Triple fugue: 1st subject, mainly strings; 2nd subject, mainly wood winds; 3rd subject mainly brass. Then all subjects are combined. A master piece of orchestration. Great performance.
At first when I came across Bach's work, I couldn't stay attentive throughout long pieces like that, I would just realize at 6 or 7 min that I wasn't listening anymore Now I listen to 15+ min pieces without loosing attention
Thank you for the video. Can someone explain why transcriptions of BWV552 have been given the additional name "St. Anne"? I have not found any information on this so far. Thanks for a short explanation.
Apparently it sounds similar to an English hymn by William Croft best known as St. Anne. As Wikipedia notes "One of Croft's most enduring pieces is the hymn tune "St Anne" written to the poem Our God, Our Help in Ages Past by Isaac Watts. Other composers subsequently incorporated the tune in their own works. Handel used it, for instance, in an anthem entitled O Praise the Lord and also Hubert Parry in his 1911 Coronation Te Deum.[7] Bach's Fugue in E-flat major, BWV 552, is often called the "St. Anne", due to the similarity (coincidental in this case) of its subject to the hymn melody's first phrase."
Respighi did a couple fantastic ones too, but I share your sentiment that Schoenberg is much better at this than Stokowski (as good a conductor as the latter is)
@@orb3796 I agree. I remember listening to the Saint Saens organ symphony at the Albert Hall about 1970. I was sitting at the back beside the organ. I couldn't hear it but I could feel it as a great vibration inside my chest. Never forgotten.
I still say it's almost impossible to orchestrate a Bach organ work. It just doesn't work. It's like an organ changing stops every few seconds. It destroys all the voicing symmetry. Plus, they orchestrate rapid volume changes all the time, instead of the more organized terraced dynamics used on the organ Maybe if it was only strings or something.
Bach did so himself in some works -- and worked some chamber and choral works into organ works. Transcription is much of the way of the virtuoso performer (as with Liszt more than a century later). I have heard numerous arrangements of the Toccata and Fugue in d -- orchestra, piano, and synthesizer -- and the organ work was itself a translation of a work for solo violin. If it works, then it is fine.
Am I the only one who finds this arrangement quite... well... cheesy? It feels like the little motifs and parallels that glide along with a kind of subtle sublimity in the organ work are now really telegraphed & accented in 20 different colours of highlighter pen. The mental images it conjures for me are more like little cartoon animals than the stained glass windows or serene skies that JSB calls up. I mean it's an interesting experiment, and was worthwhile doing, but it lacks a key element of what makes Bach so great. Some people say Glenn Gould's interpretations of Bach are eccentric or crazy - but the success of them lies in making the music *more* Bach than other piano interpretations, by finding solutions to the problem of playing them on a very different (and more dynamic) instrument than they were written for. For me Schoenberg's Klangfarben orchestration makes the piece *less* Bach, and more 19th-century romanticism. ( Interestingly, it works a lot better during the quieter passages - probably because this places a hard cap on the dynamic range, and brings it naturally nearer to the original organ. The start of the fugue is really good. 8:56 )
I think you miss the point. This is Bach's ST. ANNE the way Schonberg hears it. Webern's orchestration of the Musical Offering RICERCARE is even more extreme but similarly brilliant in its way. I love them both.
Yeah I was listening to the Ricercare the same day I found the Schoenberg St Anne, and I had similar issues with that. But although it took things even further technically, I think the natural reserve of Webern's personality was perhaps a better fit with Bach's source material. That's the thing - I do *like* Schoenberg's more romantic stuff, in fact it was being blown away by Verklärte Nacht that first turned me on to him - but I just don't feel it as a good fit with the Bach. I get that he wanted to express the way he heard it in technicolor ( "kaleidoscopic" was the phrase he used I think ) but in the louder and faster passages it strays a bit too far into film music territory for my own taste. Having said that, it's something I will definitely listen to again, so maybe I'll find other aspects to the kaleidoscope...
Sorry but what you undedstand as more Bach is just the way you are used to this kind of organ music. Listen to orchestral Bach like Oratoties because he uses the klangfarben as much as possible..even Klangfarbenmelodie as Schönberg. He just didn't have the arsenal Schöneberg had. I find this the best way you could have been orchestrating such a piece because it is full of live and contrasts what Stockovski lacks a ton.
@@Apfelstrudl another good example of Bach's ingenious instrumentations are the Brandenburg Concertos where you see how much thought he sometimes put into timbre, tone colour and sonic effects. We tend to think he only wrote abstract stuff a la AoF
Again, a terrible transcription of Bach to orchestra. Like Webern, Schoenberg has melodic and harmonic lines jumping from one section of the orchestra right in the middle of musical phrases, destroying any continuity, like the way a modern hack director uses "fast cuts" in a movie to generate "excitement" when he can't think of any other way. If an organist changed stops like Schoenberg changes orchestration, the organist would be considered almost clueless.. Reger, on the other hand, was a master, as was Liszt, both no doubt because their were also masters of the organ. Oddly, Stravinsky's transcriptions were also excellent, although probably due mostly to his almost supernatural understanding of the unique sounds of the sections of an orchestra.
Must be sad, to be as ignorant as you are - just thinking in stops where you describe the huge advantages of an orchestra, which good orchestrators use. There is no better Orchestrator for Bach than Schönberg was. You must be talking about Stokovsky because Stravinsky just arranged the Choral Variations and they clearly have a elaborated sound like Schönberg. And Stokovskys arrangements are brutally lame and lack a whole understanding of orchestral nuances.
"If an organist changed stops like Schoenberg changes orchestration, the organist would be considered almost clueless." But an orchestra is NOT an organ. That's the whole point. It's not like this piece is preventing you from listening to the original work on organ if you want to.
Schoenberg applied his theory of tone color melody to his orchestration of the Saint Anne prelude and fugue by Bach, and the results, except for a few instances, are unnatural and strange. He interpolates changes of color in places where it is unnecessary, in fact blocking the natural flow of melody. The same applies to his orchestration of the Brahms Piano Quartet. That he knew the orchestra is without question, and his coloration in his own works seem natural, unforced, but unfortunately in the works of others it does not.
Technically you are right, however I think Schonberg aimed beyond simply transcribing an organ piece to what Bach might have written for a large orchestra, had he wished to and disposed of the orchestral means of the 20th century. Schonberg used this pretext to create his own view of this wonderful piece. It's a Romantic piece of music in its own right, it's not to be compared to Bach's creation. Just my two cents.
Maybe, but I still see it as vehicle for Schoenberg's idea of tone color, which as I said, works best in his own music, but not in others. I don't think he was imagining what Bach might have written for a modern orchestra, more like Schoenberg applying his ideas of color to the music of Bach. @@florinchirila9573
@@muslit "unnatural and strange" If it were really unnatural and strange, it would not be so beautiful to listen to. Anybody is free to make a more "correct" (to your ears) arrangement, but this, as is, is great piece of music, in its own right.
@@florinchirila9573 I don't think an orchestration by Bach of this piece would resemble Schoenberg's at all, even using all of the 20th century's orchestral know-how at his disposal.
@@alexanderreikreik are you really so petty you run around complaining about typos? Besides, English is not my first language but I'd still argue I write better English than the average native speaker.
I love this arrangement TREMENDOUSLY! It’s the best orchestral arrangement ever. And perhaps also the very best work for orchestra ever. Every human being on earth should hear this at least once a day.
