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Stokowski transcriptions4/28/2023 ![]() The material, tastefully arranged by Chris Marshall (Jones’s husband), is from a variety of sources: classical, folk, and pop as well as movies (“Love Actually”) and TV (“Downton Abbey”). Welsh harpist Claire Jones’s new CD, “Royal Harp Strings” (on Silva Classics), is a compilation of two of her albums in which she is accompanied by the London Mozart Players and the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Stuart Morley. The Wagner excerpts are viscerally exciting. More pleasing Bach on the album are the “Air on the G String,” “Sheep May Safely Graze,” and the “Little Fugue in G Minor.” Mussorgsky’s “A Night on the Bare Mountain” (also included in “Fantasia”) is spectacularly hair-raising, while Stokowski’s orchestration of Tchaikovsky’s song “Solitude” is sensitive. While Stokowski’s orchestrations went out of style after his death, his work has been reassessed in recent years, both through Serebrier’s recordings (from which this CD is culled) and from an increasing number of live performances, such as concerts by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Rather, his arrangement is romantic, with a rich orchestral sound. ![]() Stokowski’s approach makes no attempt to be historically correct. Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” was written for organ, but it became better known when Stokowski played his orchestral version in “Fantasia.” (Incidentally, early in Stokowski’s career, he was the organist at St. In recent decades, the original instruments movement has been dominant, reflecting an attempt to recreate the sound of performances during the Baroque period. The two men were also close because Stokowski conducted some of Serebrier’s own compositions. Serebrier is up to the task since he spent five years as Stokowski’s assistant conductor. Both of these are performed on a new compilation CD, “Stokowski Transcriptions” (on Naxos), performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by José Serebrier. ‘Stokowski Transcriptions’Ĭonductor Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977), is best known for his appearance in Disney’s “Fantasia,” where, in addition to meeting Mickey Mouse, he conducted two of his more famous transcriptions. Transcription can involve expansion from one instrument to a full orchestra, as in Ravel’s popular orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which was written for solo piano, or Liszt’s boiling down Beethoven symphonies to solo piano versions. Like translating poetry from one language to another, the new version does not sound the same as the original but, if done well, creates its own interest. What is transcription? In classical music, it involves altering the instrumentation of a piece.
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