Bach/Webern, Fuga (Ricercata) a 6 voci

In this remarkable arrangement, Anton Webern turns to the six-voice Ricercar from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Musical Offering. Bach’s original is an extraordinary feat of contrapuntal invention: one compact subject is transformed, inverted, stretched, and interwoven among six independent lines with seemingly inexhaustible imagination. Webern’s 1935 orchestration does not modernize Bach so much as illuminate him. By assigning successive fragments of the fugue to changing instrumental colors, he makes each entrance, echo, and transformation audible with almost microscopic clarity. The result is both austere and radiant: Bach’s densely woven architecture becomes a shifting mosaic of sound, revealing the profound kinship between Baroque counterpoint and Webern’s own intensely concentrated musical language.

Saint-Saëns, Symphony No. 3, Op. 78 “Organ”

Camille Saint-Saëns’s Symphony No. 3, completed in 1886 for London’s Philharmonic Society, is one of the great orchestral showpieces of the Romantic era. Though known as the “Organ” Symphony, it is not a concerto: the organ is woven into the orchestral fabric, first lending a hushed, luminous halo to the slow movement and later unleashing its full grandeur in the finale. Saint-Saëns himself conducted the premiere in London on May 19, 1886. Rather than following the usual four-movement design, Saint-Saëns binds the work into two large parts, with ideas continually returning in altered forms. A restless opening motive reappears as a tender melody, a feverish scherzo, and finally a triumphant proclamation. The piano—heard both four-hands and two-hands—adds another unexpected color, while the organ’s great C-major entrance transforms the symphony’s earlier shadows into blazing affirmation.