Some ten years before attending the Rhapsody in Blue premiere mentioned earlier, Stravinsky had witnessed the first performance of his ballet The Rite of Spring, in 1913. His avant-garde, rhythmically complex, explosive score met with an equally violent reaction from the audience, which is well documented. Nonetheless, Stravinsky went on to make an arrangement of that score for piano duet, transferring the burden of performance from more than a hundred players to just twenty fingers and thumbs.

With Stravinsky’s approval, the Russian pianist Vladimir Leyetchkiss (1934–2016) took it a step further and produced a notoriously difficult rearrangement of Stravinsky’s piano duet version, this time for a mere ten digits in a piano solo. Here’s the final section of Leyetchkiss’ arrangement, in which a chosen girl, who is involved in pagan, euphoric ritualistic dancing is handed over to the scenario’s wise elders and sacrifices herself in a delirious, holy dance.

We move to more relaxed tones now from the pen of Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) who was one of the most distinguished violinists of his time and a leading virtuoso on the instrument. As a composer he provided himself with a series of brief encore pieces, well suited to the then requirements of the recording studio. They took the form of arrangements and transcriptions as well as a more controversial series of pieces attributed to composers of the past but which were actually by Kreisler himself. These too have become a standard part of the violin repertoire. We’ll hear Kreisler’s arrangement for violin and piano of the Mélodie in G-flat major, originally written for piano solo by the Polish pianist and composer Jan Paderewski (1860–1941).

Jascha Heifetz, the other distinguished violinist attending the Rhapsody in Blue premiere, made his London debut in 1920 at the Queen’s Hall. The performance was attended by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) the Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. Shaw subsequently wrote to Heifetz:

“Your recital has filled me and my wife with anxiety. If you provoke a jealous God by playing with such superhuman perfection, you will die young. I earnestly advise you to play something badly every night before going to bed, instead of saying your prayers. No mortal should presume to play so faultlessly.”

Here’s Heifetz himself playing his own arrangement of Bess, You is My Woman Now from Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess recorded in the mid-1940s.

Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) was written for piano solo but is probably most widely heard today in the orchestral transcription Maurice Ravel made of the piece. Ravel wasn’t the only one to be inspired to transport Mussorgsky’s music from the keyboard to the colour of an orchestra; in fact, he was only one of many. Among them was Leopold Stokowski, one of the two noted conductors at the Gershwin premiere. He made his debut as a conductor in Paris in 1908 and became principal conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 1909. He first conducted the Philadelphia Symphony in 1912, continuing his association with the orchestra for many years.

Stokowski boasted a particularly wide repertoire as a conductor, but he’s equally well remembered for his 200-plus transcriptions that include works by Bach, Handel and Purcell, and works that he called ‘symphonic syntheses’ of Wagner operas—tone poems derived from orchestral transcriptions of Wagner’s works. To close today’s blog, I’ve chosen Gnomus from Stokowski’s orchestral transcription of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.