Kevin Sutton wrote in reply to Donald Satz about the Stokowski/Bach
transcriptions:

>>3.  The Conducting All-Wrong Award - The $300 gift certificate to the hair
>>salon of his choice goes to Stowkowski for his recordings of Bach.  When
>>asked if he played Bach as if he was Tchaikovsky, Stokie claimed to have a
>>photograph of the two composers engaging in an intimate musical discussion.
>>"They were soul mates, and I just wanted to highlight the connection."
>
>I appreciate Don's wit, but I think he got it wrong here.  Stokie never
>claimed that any of his Bach was authentic and his arrangements were
>just that, arrangements.

I'll admit that the Stokowskis are a guilty pleasure for me.  Perhaps in
the context of the times in which they were conceived, they were a means
for the audience to hear Bach when they otherwise wouldn't have known
anything but a few organ pieces during church services.  And many of these
are arrangements of keyboard works, after all, so they are definitely going
to have some freedom of "conception" involved.  Perhaps Don's ire might be
better directed at pieces like those Olde English Empire transcriptions of
Handel's *orchestral* music, like the Hamilton Harty versions of the Water
Music and Fireworks Music, or (dare I say it?) the Beecham transcriptions?

I actually do love these hoary old arrangements in all their unHIPness,
but I wonder why those guys thought their orchestration skills were that
much better than Handel's own....did they consider G.F. that much of a
hack? The originals do sound quite fine when played in the composer's own
orchestration, and that includes when they're played with scaled-up use
of modern instruments, IMHO.  Perhaps the "modern" symphony orchestras of
Harty's time couldn't handle the "baroqueness" of Handel's writing, with
the high brass tessituras and the like (something Mozart saw when he made
his transcriptions of "Messiah")?

At any rate, Don's awards do fire my curiosity about the translucency of
the windows through which musicians of different eras see each other.

Bill H.