A Recital by Tom Borrow piano

Johann Sebastian Bach/Sergei Rachmaninoff

Selections from Partita No. 3 for Unaccompanied Violin in E major, BWV 1006

Like Liszt and many other keyboard giants, Rachmaninoff made a number of transcriptions for piano of well-known works in other genres. One reason for this was to offer something familiar to his audiences, who generally preferred to hear music they already knew to something unfamiliar. Another (and perhaps more important) reason was to create a showpiece of transcendent virtuosity, bringing within the compass of two hands on a keyboard a composition that originally called for a full orchestra or some other larger components. And perhaps the transcriber simply liked someone else’s piece so much that he wanted to play it himself.

For the first eight years after Rachmaninoff settled in the United States, he did not write a single original composition. He still hoped to finish at least two major compositions that he had begun in Russia and brought with him, but for a time he could not find it in himself to work on them. This may be the reason for the substantial number of arrangements and transcriptions from these years, works in which Rachmaninoff exercised his astonishing keyboard prowess on older music, usually very well known in its original form.

Bach was himself a superb arranger and the number of composers who have made arrangements of Bach’s music is innumerable. In March 1933 Rachmaninoff made a transcription of the Prélude from Bach’s Partita no. 3 for unaccompanied violin, later adding the Gavotte and Gigue to make a short suite. He elaborated the single-line part, spelling out the implicit harmonies and incorporating the rich and complex textures typical of his own music. — © Harlow Robinson

J. S. Bach/Samuil Feinberg

Largo from Organ Trio Sonata No. 5 in C major, BWV 529

ach assembled his Six Organ Trio Sonatas into a single collection in around 1730 while employed at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. More than two-thirds of the eighteen total movements in the set come from earlier compositions, mostly for violin and woodwinds. As the most common type of Baroque instrumental chamber music, the trio sonata normally required four performers: two violins, plus cello and organ or harpsichord, who together perform the continuo part.

To transfer this form to the organ, Bach gave the two upper parts to the hands, each playing on a separate keyboard, while the continuo part would be played on the pedals, exploiting the unique possibilities of the organ as no composer had done before. The second movement of the fifth Trio Sonata, a meditative Largo, is a dialogue between two voices over a continuo bass that seems to show the influence of the sonata style of Italian composer Arcangelo Corelli.

In the 1930s the Russian Soviet composer and pianist Samuil Feinberg, a passionate Bach enthusiast, transcribed this movement for piano. Feinberg adds octaves and other embellishments, thickening the texture and creating a feeling of spaciousness. The result could perhaps be described as a fantasy rather than a transcription.

— © Harlow Robinson

J. S. Bach/Egon Petri

Sheep may safely graze from Cantata: Was mir behagt, BWV 208

The evening’s program continues with one of Johann Sebastian Bach’s most famous cantata arias, Sheep may safely graze, as arranged for piano by Egon Petri. Petri excerpted this aria from Bach’s secular Hunt Cantata, BWV 208. Bach composed the piece—titled in full Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd! (The only thing that pleases me is the lively hunt!)—while he was living in Weimar. On the occasion of the neighboring Duke Christian of Sachsen-Weißenfels’s birthday in 1713, this piece was performed at a banquet following (what else) a hunting party. The mythological text of the cantata features the Roman hunting goddess Diana, who praises Duke Christian, a philanthropist and hunting enthusiast; she calls him the modern embodiment of the god Pan. (In fact, the Duke’s spending on hunting parties and cultural and scientific endeavors extended into profligacy; he ultimately drove his duchy into bankruptcy.)

In the Arcadian setting of Bach’s cantata, the hunt models social cooperation and nobility by providing both diversion and sustenance for the community. The aria Sheep may safely graze, sung by a soprano playing the character of Pales, Roman god of shepherds, introduces another layer to this metaphor. Duke Christian is compared to a “good shepherd” watching over his flock. “Where rulers rule well,” the text opines, “one can feel rest, peace, and all that makes the land happy.” The two obbligato flutes that accompany this aria envoke the pastoral image of a panpipe as they play their famous melody. In addition to being synonymous with the Arcadian pastoral, the imagery of the good shepherd of course has Christian overtones. In more recent days, when the aria is much more often performed on its own than with the rest of the Cantata, this layer of meaning has come to predominate; the piece is frequently played at wedding ceremonies and church services.

Egon Petri was a Dutch pianist with a great reverence for Bach. A student of Ferrucio Busoni—the next arranger on our program—he assisted his teacher in his monumental effort to arrange all of Bach’s keyboard music for the modern piano. Unlike the other Bach arrangements on this half of the program, Petri’s piece avoids showy virtuosity in favor of a faithful legato rendition of this gentle aria. The arrangement is built on rocking parallel thirds that allow the simple melody to glide along smoothly and effortlessly. Petri follows the original structure of Bach’s da capo aria, beginning with the major-key A section before wending his way through the more harmonically complex B section, which begins in the relative minor before effecting a retransition to the repeat of the A section. Petri asks the performer to play this final A section even more quietly, even more smoothly, demanding an expressive expertise that further distinguishes this arrangement from the others on the program.

— © Erin Pratt and Joseph Pfender

J. S. Bach/Ferruccio Busoni

Chaconne from Partita No. 2 for Unaccompanied Violin in D minor, BWV 1004

Probably the most famous single work for unaccompanied violin is J. S. Bach’s D-minor Chaconne, the closing movement of his second partita, BWV 1004. The chaconne is a variation form involving a ground bass—a melody that keeps reiterating itself over and over—against which other musical ideas are projected in a plan of increasing tension and complexity. The chaconne became a favorite genre in the Baroque era, usually for orchestra, for chamber ensembles of several instruments, or for harpsichord or organ. One famous example of an operatic chaconne is Purcell’s great aria at the end of Dido and Aeneas, “When I am laid in earth.”

But when a composer writes a chaconne for an instrument like the solo violin, a great part of the challenge is getting the counterpoint to work. The violin is normally thought of as a melody instrument most suitable for playing a single line. But a chaconne requires at least two melodic lines: the repeating bass, and the melody above it with its continually changing variations.

Bach’s solution is so ingenious technically and so rich musically that it became established as the locus classicus of such creations. He created a richly complex texture through double-stopping (requiring the player to perform on two or more strings at a time); this involves elaborate work in the left hand while the right arm has to control the bow so that it sounds on several strings at once. If the result had merely been one of the greatest of all technical challenges to the violinist, the work would still be played by every advanced violinist in the world. But it is more than that—it is also a supremely original work of music, quite aside from the difficulty of performing it. Many composers have been drawn to the piece, not only to study it, but to rework it in transcriptions for other instruments, including the full orchestra—so rich are the implications of Bach’s work!

Bach’s Chaconne is a set of continuous linked variations. For the most part variations appear in pairs, with the second slightly elaborating the material of the first. Because the bass line must be repeated throughout the piece, there can be no real modulation, but Bach does provide important harmonic variety by offering a section in D major in the middle before returning to the minor mode at the end. Nowhere else in his solo string music did Bach surpass the imagination, contrapuntal inventiveness, and virtuosic demands of this piece.

Feruccio Busoni wrote his first Bach transcriptions in Leipzig in the 1880s, when he became acquainted with the sound of Bach’s organ music in its original setting (and in many cases on the selfsame instruments for which Bach originally wrote it). His transcription of the Chaconne came while he was living in Boston in 1892. Busoni’s transcriptions were a way of absorbing Bach’s style in order to undertake more elaborate studies that would serve as a kind of commentary on his music. Of course Busoni’s transcriptions were also specifically made for concert performances as a way of bringing some of Bach’s works—less well known then than now—to public notice. — © Steven Ledbetter

Robert Schumann

Fantasy in C major, op. 17

A large percentage of Schumann’s music contains personal references to people and events in his life, often coded so as to be comprehensible only to the recipient of the message, or sometimes only to the composer himself. Of all the works in this vein, the Fantasy is among the most personal and striking, playing “at the border of life and art.”

Schumann composed what was to become the first movement of the Fantasy in the early summer of 1836 as a single-movement work. This was a low point in his life because he had been forced to agree not to communicate with Clara Wieck, the love of his life, after her father objected to their romance and demanded that they return the love letters they had exchanged. Their future together seemed hopeless.

In response to this situation, Schumann composed a single movement entitled “Ruins—Fantasy for pianoforte.” The ruin in question was clearly that of his hopes to make a life with Clara. Once Robert and Clara had been able to resume their courtship in 1839, Schumann finally shared the Fantasy with Clara, writing “in order to understand the Fantasy, you will have to transport yourself into the unhappy summer of 1836, when I renounced you.”

Though the first movement was a reflection of Schumann’s gloomy mood at his enforced separation from Clara, the remaining two movements owe their inspiration to a different source, one who regularly inspired Schumann to greater heights of compositional daring—Beethoven. In 1836 a great monument to Beethoven in his birthplace, Bonn, was being planned. Organizers of the initiative tried to find various ways to raise the money for the project.

Schumann was very enthusiastic about the idea and wanted to do his part to contribute to the creation of such a monument. Late in the summer of 1836 he quickly drafted two more movements to go with the opening “Ruins,” making a large-scale work that he felt was something on the order of one of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. On December 19 he wrote to his publisher Kistner with the idea that a certain number of copies of this new piece be donated to the organizers of the monument fund so that they could be sold for its benefit.

Over the next three years Schumann considered several possible titles for both the entire three-movement work and also for the individual movements. In 1839 he almost published it as Dichtungen (Poems), but at the last minute he changed it to Fantasy, thus returning to the original title the work had borne when it was but a single movement. He dropped “Ruins” as the title for the first movement on the logical grounds that it would mislead people into thinking that it referred to classical antiquity rather than the ruin of his own life. But the connection with plans for the Beethoven monument lingers in the work’s dedication to Franz Liszt, who made the single largest contribution to assure that the Beethoven monument would be built when the fundraising seemed to be faltering.

Schumann’s musical personas Florestan and Eusebius are fully present in this work—Florestan (a name Schumann took from the hero of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio) in the grand, heroic, assertive opening of the first movement, Eusebius in the quieter, inward-turning conclusion. Florestan returns to dominate the heroism of the middle movement while Eusebius is the moving spirit of the hymnic third movement. On June 9, 1839, Schumann sent to Clara a quatrain from the poet Friedrich Schlegel that he later made an epigraph on the score of the Fantasy: “Through all the notes in earth’s many-colored dream, a quietly long-drawn note sounds for one who listens in secret.” For Robert, who wrote virtually all of his works for Clara after their meeting, she was someone who truly deserved to be that “one who listens in secret.”

— © Steven Ledbetter

Pianist Tom Borrow earned sensational public and critical acclaim in 2019 when, with only 36 hours’ notice, he replaced pianist Khatia Buniatishvili in a series of 12 concerts performing Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G on tour with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. A recent BBC New Generation Artist, Tom has performed with leading orchestras including the BBC Symphony, Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI, and the leading orchestras of London, Cleveland, Baltimore, St. Louis, Atlanta, New Jersey, and Pittsburgh, among others, and with the conductors Bychkov, Luisi, Eschenbach, Fischer, Oramo, Zhang, Denève, Saraste, Suzuki, and Elder. Tom has appeared at the BBC Proms, the Verbier and Ruhr Festivals, Wigmore Hall, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Berlin Konzerthaus, Vienna Konzerthaus, and Vancouver Recital Society. Following recognition by International Piano, Gramophone, and Musical America, he was later presented with the prestigious Terence Judd–Hallé Award 2023. During 2024–25 he is artist-in-residence for the São Paulo Symphony. In 2025–26 he will be in residence with the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini during its Fiftieth Anniversary season, marking the third residency of his career. Upcoming highlights include Tom’s first collaboration with Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and his return to São Paulo to complete his Beethoven concertos cycle. Born in Tel Aviv in 2000, Tom began studying piano at age five and has been mentored by Murray Perahia. Tom makes his Aspen Music Festival debut this season.