Details: Innumerable transcriptions of Bach's music were made in the 19th and 20th centuries, and many of them bear the signatures of both well-known and lesser-known composers. Among the former are Bruno G. Seidhofler's notable piano 4-hands version of The Art of Fugue (1937) and the splen- did transcription of the Orgel-Buchlein by Bernhard Friedrich Richter (1902) that is featured on this recording. Before the advent of the phonograph, piano duo transcriptions made music of all sorts accessible to vast audiences outside the concert hall, in the intimacy of their own homes. They also allowed for repeated listening 'on demand', facili- tating a more detailed study of a work's intricacies. The artists' approach here - in an advanced vein of historically informed performance -takes inspi- ration from well-established Bach performance practice and then filters that through two specific media: the chosen instrument of an early 20th- century upright piano and the set of performance indications scrupulously laid down by Richter, which range from tempo indications assigned to each chorale and numerous (yet not too intrusive) agogic signs, to the octave doubling he often added in the soprano and/or bass. In the words of Harnoncourt, 'Each period has precisely the instrumentarium best suited to it's own music. In their imagination, composers hear the instruments of their own time [...]'. And the great Baroque oboist Bruce Haynes wrote: 'Instruments can be seen in terms of Darwinian adaptation. They are constantly chan- ging in small ways to make it easier for musicians to perform the music currently in fashion. There is an immense pressure on instruments to be as well-adapted as possible to the music of their time. Instrument makers are very receptive to the demands of players, and these demands are the immediate cause of mutations.' The 1912 Kaps piano played here, with it's many technical innovations for it's day, comes precisely from the time of Richter's interpretation of the Orgel- Buchlein. The piano was preserved in perfect condition, with original strings and hammers, and it's restoration afforded a scupulous reconstruction of every mechanism and resonator. Ernst Kaps obtained a number of patents on the inventions he applied to his instruments, among them double over- stringing (1865) employing three bridges (bass, tenor and treble), which provided even smaller instruments with greater power of sound.

J.S. Bach - J.S. Bach: Orgelbuchlein, BWV 599-644 arranged for Piano 4-hands by Bernhard Friedrich Richter (CD)