Arrangements – contemporary affectation or continuing tradition?

by Andre Swanepoel, Principal Second Violin

One of the great pleasures of being in the Irish Chamber Orchestra is chatting to audience members after a concert and sharing our views and experiences of the performance. In one of these discussions I was recently asked why the ICO plays so many arrangements. I must confess the question surprised me, as I wasn’t aware we played unusually many, but it inspired me to look into the matter. After a little research I discovered the practise of arranging music for groups different from the original has been prevalent for centuries, driven by a belief shared by the great composers that their great music was vibrant and pliable and not necessarily intended as museum pieces cast in a certain mould for eternity.

 J.S. Bach arranged many of his own works for different instrumental groups and was a keen arranger of other composers’ music, in particular that of Vivaldi. These arrangements were made to be performed and familiarise audiences with music they might not have heard before.

The habit continued in the Classical era: Mozart, for instance, reworked Handel’s Messiah for a Classical-size orchestra and transcribed Adagios and Fugues by J.S Bach for String Trio (KV 404). He also wrote in 178  ‘I have now no slight task to get my opera [The Abduction from the Seraglio] arranged for wind band by Sunday week, lest somebody else should get in before me and reap the profit.’ 

The Romantics also looked at their own works and those of others from new angles, showing willingness to expand the repertoire through experimentation. Beethoven arranged his own Violin Concerto for Piano and orchestra and the genesis of Schumann’s cello Concerto reads like a detective story, including versions the composer adapted for violin, string quartet and even wind band. Schumann and his friend Mendelssohn also wrote piano accompaniments to Bach’s unaccompanied Sonatas and Suites – a transgression onto hallowed ground that would cause today’s music purists to screech in horror. Yet the motive behind this was again to facilitate the performance of great (probably unknown) music to the audience of the day.

Into the twentieth century, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern arranged chamber versions of Waltzes by Johann Strauss as well as epics such as Mahler’s 4^th Symphony, Bruckner’s 7^th Symphony to enable smaller-scale performances. Ravel orchestrated Mussorgsky’s solo piano work Pictures at an Exhibition for large orchestra (a version perhaps better known now than the original).

And so the list continues (those listed above are just an ice-berg tip of examples), as it becomes clear that transcriptions and arrangements have been a constant creative feature in classical music.

The original discussion was about the ICO’s repertoire. ‘Standard’ string orchestra repertoire includes Concerti Grossi by baroque composers (such as the Corelli heard tonight or the Handel we performed last month), some classical Divertimenti and a number of romantic/later ‘warhorses’ - a term given to established works of consistent popularity. When one looks into the origins of single movements from Concerti Grossi (and they are too plentiful to go into detail here) it swiftly becomes apparent that a great many of them were transcribed from different sources anyway so are, in effect, arrangements.

Examples of ‘warhorses’ would include a foursome of evergreen Serenades, but also Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden, Schoenberg’s Verkärte Nacht and Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony. Because these have become such established cornerstones of the mainstream repertoire it is sometimes forgotten that all of these works were originally cast in different moulds: Souvenir de Florence and Verkärte Nacht were string Sextets, whereas Death and the Maiden and Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony were string Quartets (Schoenberg was the only composer who did the transcribing work himself...).

So, why do the ICO play so many arrangements? I don’t really think we do. Looking at recent programmes, there are some arrangements, but there are many more works performed in original form. As for the arrangements we do play, we’ve seen that some have become so established they are no longer thought of as arrangements. If we stopped performing the other, unknown ones, something that’s been part of the classical music tradition since time immemorial would cease to happen – depriving us the chance to perform great music that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to play to you, our much appreciated audience.