sawyl | Transcriptions: good but inauthentic

I've just noticed that Nikolai Demidenko has recorded a second volume of Ferruccio Busoni's Bach transcriptions. I'm seriously tempted. Somewhat shamefully, I completely and utterly adore the Busoni transcriptions with their overblown Romanticism and, in the case of the Hyperion recordings, glacial tempi — Demidenko drags out the adagio from BWV 564 to a staggering 7 minutes, but somehow manages to hold things together.

I'm not quite sure why I like transcriptions as much as I do. Perhaps it's the way that the arranging process can bring out hidden details: by emphasizing one line over another and by bringing out elements that might be hidden by quirks of registration, buried structures suddenly become visible and the whole piece suddenly makes sense in a way that it didn't in its original form. So, for example, I used to be hugely unimpressed with Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E-flat major BWV 552. But then I just happened to hear Arnold Schoenberg's orchestral transcription on the radio and found that the whole piece made sense to me and was able to see the original in a completely new light.

So maybe I will by the second volume of the Bach-Busoni transcriptions and let authenticity go hang...