The orchestration of Albeniz' El Peurto from Iberia is probably better than the version for piano. Balakirev and Glazunov have orchestrated some of the piano works of Chopin to great effect.

There's an old Ansermet recording with the Suisse Romande Orchestra on Decca. It's been reissued as part of a 6 CD set, but I think it may also be found on Australian Eloquence as a single.

A few other fairly obscure orchestrations people may find it interesting to know exist - Felix Weingartner did one of the Hammerklavier, Percy Grainger did a wonderful one of Ravel's La vallée des cloches, Jean Francaix did the Chopin Preludes (ssshh!! don't tell Bruce ), and Edmund Rubbra did one of Brahms' Handel Variantions.

I'm not sure people realize there are other orchestrations of Pictures besides the ubiquitous one by Ravel. Leonard Slatkin has made something of a speciality of putting together performances of Pictures that sample from various orchestrations, and this recording is an example of it. The review at that site gives some specifics about each section. Also, I highly recommend that people who really love the music hear the complete Stokowski orchestration - it's a knock-out.

If you can stomach it, this is kind of funny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np4jmFNX5Mw

It sounds so.. banal..magic-free.

But for me it's at least partly because I am so used to the piano version. I find it impossible to answer the question "would I like it more if I had never heard the original?"

Has anyone mentioned Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2? It seems to be much better suited to orchestra than for piano!

Even if piano solos orchestrated for piano and orchestra aren't the focus of this thread, Kazimierz Wilkomirski's treatment of Chopin's Allegro de Concert is wonderfully realized and deserves a mention anyway. Unfortunately, the only recording of it that I'm aware of—by Michael Ponti and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra on Volume 1 of Vox's "The Romantic Piano Concerto" series—has gone out of print in CD form, though it's still downloadable at Amazon.com.

Considering how little interest there is in the Allegro in its original form, it's unsurprising that its rendering as a concerto movement remains thoroughly under the radar.

Steven

There is no good answer to your question. You could not even conduct a prospective experiment to answer it since a good control would be difficult to achieve.
There is definitely the "imprinting in one's memory" issue that could bias our assessment of the piece in its new form. But also, the outcome is highly dependent on the skills of the original composer and those of the transcriber.

Thanks, that was really interesting. I don't really "get" old-fashioned classical ballets, so as usual, I was just kind of bemused and bewildered by the dancing (maybe my feeling about that is something like how people who aren't into classical music would feel about listening to a pianist play Carnaval).

Also, since it was actually played as the accompaniment to the ballet rather than a standalone work, the conductor needed to follow the dancers rather than performing the music simply as music. And the orchestra (and the recording) didn't sound too wonderful. Still, the orchestrations seemed competent, if not very inspired or original, and it was fun to hear the music in a different guise.

I found myself thinking about how different musical effect can be simply because it is being played by lots of musicians rather than just one. Especially in live performance, listening to a soloist is intensely focused on just one person, while with chamber music the focus changes (I do something like shifting focus between the whole ensemble and the individuals). With an orchestra, all that is multiplied, and in addition, there's the conductor. So, besides the changes in timbre and such, I think orchestrations also change the way we focus on the music, if that makes any sense. It is like a shift from private to public, in a way. And just the opposite happens in piano solo transcriptions of music for more than just one player.

When scrolling though the mails of this thread, I did not find two IMO very good transcribtions:

- Tjaikovsky's "The seasons", arranged for orchestra by a sovjet-russian conductor. I have the whole suite on LP. Some of the pieces are very colorful with orchestra. But I personnaly like the paino version better

I scrolled so fast I did not at first read the first paragraph about the "Holberg suite". I agree it is better for orchestra.

The first movement Charles-Valentin Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano Op. 39 No. 8 was orchestrated in 1872 by Karl Klindworth. People argue whether it did the original piece justice (I believe it did, and Alkan himself liked the orchestration), but even so I think it's a wonderful piece in its own right. Only the first movement was orchestrated, but the first movement is long enough to be a standalone piece. It's longer than the first movement of Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto!

It sounds like what Mozart would have composed if he lived in the Romantic Era.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRIpqMXVlMw

I like the orchestrated versions of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies better than the piano version: in fact, excerpts of it are on the lists for some instruments.