Bach Transcriptions
Another Bach anniversary offering here, featuring fine performances that have been well-recorded. These orchestrations (mainly of organ works) are essentially the product of 19th- and 20th-century composers working at a time when it was considered acceptable to pep up Bach's own orchestrations with the added color and fattening of texture available from the modern orchestra. Slatkin certainly doesn't offer the kind of overblown performances such big-boned reworkings often invited, but some may still find the echoes of that earlier tradition a shade unpalatable against the background of today's "authentic" performance styles. Some transcriptions work better than others--either when they retain a native simplicity (as in the moving Reger orchestration for strings of "O Mensch bewein' dein' Suende gross"), or when they represent the quintessential sound of the transcribing composer, as in Elgar's fabulous treatment of the Fantasia and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 537. As a snapshot of how past generations have viewed Bach, the CD has undeniable fascination value.--Andrew Green