My apologies for reacting not often enough to all your kind comments, but please be assured that I am always very touched by and grateful for all your nice words of appreciation ❤🙏 Nevertheless, honor to whom honor is due : all kudos to the unfathomable genius of J.S. Bach for having composed this heavenly, majestic, all-encompassing piece !🙇
Thank you all for your kind comments over the past years ! I'm very happy and proud to announce that the Dutch music publisher Valeur Ajoutée has just released my transcription (see the description for details). For those who are interested: I hope that you enjoy discovering and playing it as much as i do ! All the best, Yves Corsellis
I am not a religious person, but if there was one thing that would persuade me in that direction, it would be the music of the immortal J.S. Bach. And this interpretation sounds, to my untutored ear, incredibly faithful to the spirit of the original. Bravo, Yves !
Neither me. Totally agree. I think (kidding to myself) god himself disguised as composer in Bach. This piece in particular es incredible, and this performance and version is great!!!!! Well recorded too. (I also play a game saying that god cannot communicate with us, other than through art, and what he says to us is that he is not omnipotent, that he cannot help us to solve all our problems or to eliminate suffering and pain. Besides that, he tells us that he watches us suffering and that he suffers with us (just like the great Joshua Liebman said in his lovely book Piece of mind, whose reading I recommend you, with due respect). Btw, poiesis is the Greek verb for making. From the beginning, humanity confronted with death and suffering, created culture, poiesis, poetry. One of those things was religion, which is also poetry. Of course god does not exist, but loving culture authentically takes you inevitably to love and respect religion, as a cultural element, rooted in suffering and the longing for life, beauty, ideals (not the corruption or violence of the organized entities or the bigots). Thus, and atheist can be so spiritual, that ends up appearing a profoundly religious person. Spirituality is about values, for dignity and good taste. No reward expected. Doing good bears its justification, and all its reward. Lin Yutang. The importance of living.
I didn’t expect to appreciate this piano arrangement of this Bach masterpiece, but it is so clean and all lines are clearly heard. Bravo. Great arrangement and performance.
great performance, as a organist who has been playing this for years I found the subtly in phrasing, volume and speed changes very refreshing and also the ornamentation - great
MONUMENTAL - I am so THRILLED to have heard your transcription - the 13 minutes went by in a FLASH! No struggling to hear all of the organ lines that always get muddled by the diffuse sound of the organ - which helps me SO much due to my poor hearing. THANK YOU, YVES ♥♥♥♥♥
I love this performance and version. Simply here I am perplexed. How could Bach have composed such a profound masterpiece? I would dare to say that Bach was.... a god, stranded for a while in this valley of tears which is our mother the Earth. But this is oxymoronic, being myself an atheist. But its beauty, plus a well rooted spirituality based on a life of intelectualism, leads me ineluctably to this feeling. Overwhelming. Even after decades of Mahler, Shostakovich, Berg´s Wozzeck, and similar other serious composers and masterpieces, this one is a particular universe self contained in itself. Complete, clear, perfect, watertight, flawless, pristine, pure, my goodness!!!!!! I can shut the light, close my door and window, and die in peace.
I've almost always preferred the sound of a piano over an organ, but nothing beats the number of voices you can get from the latter. Maybe that's why I enjoy orchestral arrangements of Bach's work.
Quelle merveilleuse interprétation de cette belle Passacaille & Fugue du Maître de Leipzig . Toutes mes félicitations à ce grand pianiste pour ce rendu phénoménale ...
A small addendum: I have just purchased and obtained Yves's transcription and am reading his notes. The depth and genuineness of his musical, and specifically pianistic, concerns are truly striking. I am more and more taken with the analogy I suggested before, and which I think is actually quite apt as analogies go, between the work of musical transcription and that of translation of (particularly literary) texts. Yves's achievement is, if anything, even more impressive in light of the intricate and sometimes almost overwhelming difficulty of his task.
Easily the finest baroque piece of music transcribed for piano and my top 5 piano piano pieces written by anyone. Just epic and showcases Bach’s genius Awesome sound quality and acoustics. Brilliant played - very difficult piece. Bravo!
with feeling! thats how bach needs to be played on modern grand pianos. not overtoning one voice but rather letting them all be on one equal volume. great transcription and performance!
Check out Stokowski's orchestral arrangement: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-x9Sbk3E8-ws.html - It realizes the potential and power that was always locked away within the original composition. That's not to say the organ isn't powerful; it definitely is! But we all know it lacks dynamic expressiveness. And in my opinion (and this may be heresy) sometimes Bach's very complex and layered music gets kinds of "smeared" on organ and loses definition, even though he wrote it for organ in the first place (although, to be totally accurate, he probably actually wrote it with a pedal harpsichord, which would have preserved more of the fine detail -- check out the E. Power Biggs recording on RU-vid). I mean, yeah, organ delivers the huge, epic "wall of sound," but not always in a good way IMO, and sometimes at the expense of detail.
@@CaptJackAubreyOfTheRoyalNavy That is only true if the wrong stops are drawn or the organist plays it too fast in a European stone cathedral. If he/she does not release the key at the precise right moment, then muddying can occur. Dynamics can be achieved brilliantly on the organ. Virgil Fox demonstrated that. If the organist uses the shutters properly on the enclosed divisions and manipulates stops, wow. Listen to the British organist, Jonathan Scott perform this piece. It is clean and dynamic. That said, this thread is about the maestro on this performance. Absolutely stunning. I really enjoyed it.l
Marko Haramija Кому как, а по мне Ямаха звучит дёшево, ещё и громыхает на форте. Ну да что уж тут говорить- избаловали нас Стейнвеями Гульд с Рихтером ))
It was certainly energetic... I was actually looking purposefully in the comments for something on the piano, so I'll tag on to yours if you don't mind. I imagine the deeper and richer Steinway would have made a better job at the lower end. The Yamaha delivered an almost aggressive brightness and dynamic expressivity: while it was powerful, I'm not entirely sure I liked it. I'm not convinced the left end of the piano was entirely happy: it sounded overdriven, more like a harpsichord in places, with some wild overtones... perhaps that was the limitations of the internal mics of the PCM - M10 (I suspect externals weren't used, as the image wasn't very wide). Other than that, though, the piano transcription brought out a different perspective than any of the original versions I'm accustomed to could do... I have to go back and play my Biggs version now, which will forever be my favorite (and no, I don't mean his pedal harpsichord transcription!).
It's interesting to see his transcription of passages in sixteenth notes on the pedal: Busoni's prescription is to alternate between octaves and single notes - presumably in order not to tire the wrists out - but Corsellis plays in octaves throughout.
I find Yves's comments fascinating--there is a "fly on the wall" quality in reading his views of various transcriptions and performances, of what for me represents an as yet unscaled, and perhaps unscalable, musical mountain. His detailed notes make clear to what extent transcription borders, perhaps necessarily, on composition, on a new authorship--much as the case with a profession I know well, that of translation. His performance (as his transcription) is a marvel, beyond all doubt; its most striking quality, for me, its diaphanous quality, the stunningly crystalline clarity he gives to the interplay of the voices--a brilliant technical conquest. His is an intellectually fascinating and emotionally stirring interpretation. At the same time, I cannot fathom how Zhukov's performance (I refer to the 1966 studio recording) of his own transcription can possibly be heard as "detached." For me, Zhukov gives the Passacaglia and Fugue a dark majesty, a powerful and brooding, at times despairing, quality with moments of painfully earned redemptive grace, that I find unutterably moving, and unequalled among pianists that I have heard attempt this work. And in its deeply shadowed textures and the vast scale of its sonority, Zhukov's interpretation is perhaps uniquely evocative of the organ.
Amazing transcription, it’s so good you can barely tell it was intended for a different instrument. Perhaps that’s a testament to Bach himself, though.
Well almost all keyboard music can be played on any keyboard instrument. The difference here is there's not pedalboard so we're missing an entire voice.
Hi Yves! This is a brilliant transcription. My copy of it arrived today! Really enjoyed reading about your approach in the preface. I like how you are comfortable to omit notes that are already present in the overtone series of bass notes in favour of keeping the right hand playing a smooth line. I think yours and Zhukov's transcriptions are now my two favourites. Do you know if Zhukov's transcription has been published by the way? Have you heard it? What do you think of it? Do you play the organ by the way?
Hi Pete, Thank you - and everyone else here! - very much for purchasing my score and for your kind words of appreciation! Since my teenage years I have always been fascinated by the physics of sound (and by science in general for that matter). It all started with borrowing the ‘The Science of Musical Sound’ by John R. Pierce from my local library when I was 12 years old. That brilliant book was not only an eye-opener, but especially an ‘ear’-opener: it made me realize that I could hear overtones separately from their fundamental tone. Not that this matters a lot, but it is fun. As a matter of fact, I’ve known Zhukov’s transcription since a long time (from RU-vid). I don’t think it has been published, which is very unfortunate. I absolutely have great respect for it: he found some very ingenious solutions (e.g. m.161-168, m.225-236, m.246-252, the end of the Fugue…). Although he sometimes needs arpeggiating, he does it in such a way that it doesn’t harm the musical discourse at all. Yet - and this is a very personal view, so please take it with a big pinch of salt ! - he sometimes used rather strange registrations and added a lot of invented voices (m.57-62, 64-71, 98-112, 197-207,153-160 etc.). I really don’t like his very trivial second voice in m.137-143 by simply using parallel sixths/thirds. But then again, in general l find his transcription really clever. Much better than d'Alberts's, Catoire's, Malata's, Theodore-Szántó's, Jos. Weiss', Roger-Ducasse's... Yet, concerning his 2 performances on RU-vid: I find them very cold and detached. Maybe that’s a personal trait of his, or of the times he lived in? Zimerman’s performance of his own transcription on the other hand (from the same time as Zhukov's Munich performance!) isn’t like that at all! I actually prefer Zimerman’s transcription AND performance much more than Zhukov’s… Zimerman sometimes adds voices here and there as well, but does this so ingeniously and simply matchlessly. As for your last question, I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t play the organ. But I really intend to in the future… when I find some time ...
I'm not trying to take anything away from this guys performance or transcription, it's definitely great. But if you look you can find a video of a guy playing this on a pedal piano. So he is able to play the actual piece, which was written for organ. It quite literally takes this to another level.
Wonderful transcription and execution…! Of course, the piano cannot reach the full, earth-shattering majesty of the organ, but, in this performance, it comes VERY close. However, in its relatively somewhat more intimate character, the piano transcription underscores other facets of Bach’s great work.
