Innumerable transcriptions of Bach’s music were made in the 19th and 20th centuries, and many of them bear the signatures of both well-known and lesser-known composers. Among the former are Bruno G. Seidhofler’s notable piano 4-hands version of The Art of Fugue (1937) and the splendid transcription of the Orgel-Büchlein by Bernhard Friedrich Richter (1902) that is featured on this recording. Before the advent of the phonograph, piano duo transcriptions made music of all sorts accessible to vast audiences outside the concert hall, in the intimacy of their own homes. They also allowed for repeated listening ‘on demand’, facilitating a more detailed study of a work’s intricacies.

The artists’ approach here – in an advanced vein of historically informed performance –takes inspiration from well-established Bach performance practice and then filters that through two specific media: the chosen instrument of an early 20th-century upright piano and the set of performance indications scrupulously laid down by Richter, which range from tempo indications assigned to each chorale and numerous (yet not too intrusive) agogic signs, to the octave doubling he often added in the soprano and/or bass.

In the words of Harnoncourt, ‘Each period has precisely the instrumentarium best suited to its own music. In their imagination, composers hear the instruments of their own time […]’.


The piano was preserved in perfect condition, with original strings and hammers, and its restoration afforded a scupulous reconstruction of every mechanism and resonator. Ernst Kaps obtained a number of patents on the inventions he applied to his instruments, among them double over-stringing (1865) employing three bridges (bass, tenor and treble), which provided even smaller instruments with greater power of sound.