Pianist Beatrice Berrut has made an unusual specialty of transcribing orchestral works for piano. Of course, for many repertories, this would not have been seen as such an unusual thing at the time when the music was written, but here, Berrut goes beyond most of her earlier efforts into territory where her work might have been seen as strange by the composers of the music involved. There is a reason Mahler and Schoenberg did not write music for keyboard; most of their contemporaries, with the exception of the young Berg, ...
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Pianist Beatrice Berrut has made an unusual specialty of transcribing orchestral works for piano. Of course, for many repertories, this would not have been seen as such an unusual thing at the time when the music was written, but here, Berrut goes beyond most of her earlier efforts into territory where her work might have been seen as strange by the composers of the music involved. There is a reason Mahler and Schoenberg did not write music for keyboard; most of their contemporaries, with the exception of the young Berg, did not do so either. The broad conception of a Mahler symphony, or the key roles of texture in Schoenberg, are incompatible with keyboard writing, and there are deeper philosophical issues besides. Berrut admits to all this, and therein lies the intriguing quality of this release. She terms her versions transcriptions, but they aren't really, at least not in the sense of the years around 1900. Berrut freely diverges from the source text where necessary, and in her rather...
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