William Hong writtes:

>Then of course, there's plenty of music from before Corelli's (and Bach's)
>time that generally made NO specification of instruments, other than some
>"suggestions".

I recently attended a concert at which Robert Levin played Book 2 of
WTC on clavichord, piano, harpsichord, organ.  He said that Bach only
specified keyboard, so he felt quite free to do this.  The piano was an
18 th century instrument, but not a Silbermann piano, which would have
been more authentic.  And the organ was a small organ, not the real church
instrument.  Levin tried to match the music to the instrument.  It was an
interesting exercise, particularly because you got a sense of the enormous
differences in the scale of the music that you got between organ and
clavichord at the two extremes.  Yet I have to admit that, good a keyboard
artist as Levin is, there was something more than a bit distracting in
Levin's moving between instruments.  I got the impression that piano and
harpsichord comprised a reasonable middle ground for the entire work, but
that I would not at all mind hearing a complete clavichord performance.

Another experience in changing instrumentation was provided by the Naxos
cd of the two Brahms Serenades, arranged for four hand piano by Brahms
himself.  It was fascinating to hear the orchestral sounds replicated in
the piano texture, but there is one section in the Second Serenade where
even the master couldn't go all the way.  There is a section in which (as
my fevered imagination thinks of it) the woodwinds converse with each other
in the most tender and beautiful manner imaginable.  Here the piano score
could only suggest the beauty of the real thing.

Professor Bernard Chasan
Physics Department, Boston University