Throughout art history, artists have always admired the work of other artists. As in other artistic disciplines, in music it is possible to distinguish common features between the works of various composers. It was very common for them to use each other's pieces and make arrangements of those pieces within their own style, or even to transcribe the same piece with a different instrumentation. This is a popular exercise for learning that is still in practice today. For this reason, most composers' works include an important number of transcriptions, many of which are written for the piano. This accessibility of the instrument allowed them to introduce new compositions to an audience much more conveniently than employing an entire orchestra. They could also bring pieces by other composers back to life, or use those pieces as pedagogical exercises, or present them simply as piano works in their own right in concerts.[1]

            The keyboard repertoire contains a number of important transcriptions, including Antonio Vivaldi's Concerto in B minor for Four Violins, from which J. S. Bach created the Concerto in A minor for Four Harpsichord years later; or Bach's Chaconne for violin, from which Ferruccio Busoni created an oft-performed piano transcription. The most acclaimed works in this genre however, are transcriptions of orchestral pieces for the piano, and vice versa. Within this category, the most well-known works are Franz Liszt's arrangements of all of Ludwig van Beethoven's symphonies for piano, as well as his arrangement of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Among late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French composers, while one finds tributes to Jean-Philippe Rameau's music by Claude Debussy and Paul Dukas, Maurice Ravel gained much more acclaim for his transcriptions as they tended to be arrangements of piano works for orchestral ensemble. He produced beautiful orchestral versions of his own piano works, including Alborada del Gracioso, as well as of works by other composers, including Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.

            This research paper however focuses on the process and implications of creating orchestral transcriptions of Sergei Rachmaninoff's piano work Variations on a Theme of Corelli (1931). The goal of this research was to construct more than one orchestral version of some of these variations in order to help piano students such as myself arrive at more than one interpretation of the piece; the hope being, that after listening to different orchestral arrangements of the same variation, new interpretations could be both imagined and achieved.

              Technically-speaking, the piano is a percussion instrument—albeit a highly resonant, beautiful, and flexible one. As such, pianists have always had to fight against the instrument's limitations while maximizing its advantages in order to cultivate expressive performance features such as varying colours, legato, or crescendi; almost as if creating an illusion. In order to help with this process, pianists are often encouraged to imagine and recreate the timbres of other instruments in their practicing and performance activities—think orchestrally! is what we always hear—and in my experience I have found this to be a rewarding exercise, especially where tone production is concerned. Rachmaninoff is an interesting starting point for exploring the relationship between pianistic and orchestral timbres, as the richness, power, and symphonic nature of his piano music is largely a result of how he tends to spread huge chords out across all registers of the keyboard. As Franz Liszt once stated in a letter that evidences his own fascination with this relationship:

Within the span of its seven octaves it encompasses the audible range of an orchestra, and the ten fingers of a single person are enough to render the harmonies produced by the union of over a hundred concerted instruments ... Thus it bears the same relation to an orchestral work that an engraving bears to a painting: it multiplies the original and makes it available to everyone, and even if it does not reproduce the colours, it at least reproduces the light and shadow.[2]

              While pianists are used to searching for this light and shadow, I wondered: a) whether they have adequate inspiration and tools at their disposal when experimenting with new sonorities and modes of sound production at the keyboard; and b) whether the results of their experiments are as varied and as rich as they could be, given what some might argue is a certain stiffness and stagnation where the performance of familiar repertoires is concerned. By producing differing orchestral transcriptions of Rachmaninoff's Variations for solo piano, I would like to create some concrete tools for pianists that will hopefully expand their imaginations and creativity, leading to much greater interpretive multiplicity and flexibility—not only in this piece, but in all canonic repertoires. While it is not uncommon to see students looking to 'definitive' recordings in order to copy or confirm ideas about how a composition should sound, by exploring this relationship between the piano and orchestra I hope to provide them with one way of finding new and more personal paths.

           In order to explore this idea of interpretive multiplicity and flexibility in the Variations, I will be modelling my transcription process after Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances (1940): a work he produced first for orchestra, and afterwards for piano duo. By analysing these two versions, I will try to understand how he viewed the relationship between orchestral and pianistic timbres so that I can then apply a similar approach in the production of my own transcriptions of the Variations. Because I am working in the opposite direction than Rachmaninoff, from piano to orchestra, the result may differ from his Symphonic Dances. Rachmaninoff compressed the sound of an entire orchestra into two pianos, while I will spread a solo piano work across an orchestral sound palette—much as pianists are encouraged to do in their imaginations. After producing different orchestral versions of the Variations, I will then return to the solo piano version, where I will apply my findings and discuss their implications.