Organ as Orchestra, Piano Concerto as Chamber Music

There is a long and honourable tradition of transcribing orchestral music for the organ, including the accompaniments of large-scale choral works. Indeed, in the days before orchestral concerts were widespread, to say nothing of broadcasts and gramophone records, they were one of the chief means of popularising such music and bringing it to a wide audience. However, there are very few precedents for using the organ for the accompaniment of piano concertos, perhaps because of the difficulty of coordinating the two instruments in performance, which would necessarily be placed far apart. We do know that at his recital on the organ of the Palais du Trocadéro, Paris, on 10 August 1879, Eugène Gigout invited Paul Viardot to play a movement from the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and Camille Saint-Saëns to present a movement from his Third Piano Concerto. Nowadays, with electronic technology, problems of ensemble coordination largely disappear, and following a renewed interest amongst organists in the art of transcription (David Briggs, for example, has transcribed complete symphonies of Tchaikovsky and Mahler) it is perhaps an opportune moment to attempt the transcription of piano concertos. We began our research in this context with two Mozart Concerti, and we then ventured into the world of the nineteenth-century virtuoso concerto. Further research will include performances of more Mozart Concerti, Beethoven's First and Fifth 'Emperor' Piano Concerti, Chopin's First Concerto, and Rachmaninoff's 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini'. The video files in this item are supplemented with a pdf outlining our initial findings.