Carnegie Hall

Passionate sonatas, elaborate variations, and evocatively drawn character pieces. These are just some of the types of music being performed by the world’s finest pianists during Carnegie Hall’s 2021–2022 season.

Pianists Igor Levit and Evgeny Kissin present concerts that highlight one particular type of musical form: transcriptions and arrangements for piano.

J. S. Bach transcribed Vivaldi’s violin concertos for organ or harpsichord, and Liszt arranged Beethoven’s nine symphonies for solo piano. It’s an age-old tradition for composers to honor other composers by reworking their music for different instruments. The differences are subtle, but the results are stunning: Transcriptions usually follow the original work closely while arrangements can add artful touches not in the original piece.

Innovation and Virtuosity

Innovation and virtuosity went hand-in-hand when masters like composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni, and pianists Carl Tausig and Zoltán Kocsis looked to earlier works. Tausig’s arrangement of Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor for organ is one of the grand pianistic showpieces and has been a Carnegie Hall staple since Busoni first performed it here in 1892, while Kocsis’s treatment of the prelude from the first act of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde highlights the orchestral version’s harmonic daring. 

Photography: Levit by Robbie Lawrence and Felix Broede / Song Classical; Kissin by Sasha Gusov / EMI Classics.