Want to hear Mozart’s Don Giovanni without singers and orchestra? Here’s your chance. Georges Bizet transcribed the entire opera for piano solo at the behest of Heugel & Cie, who published it in 1866. Since Bizet was a virtuoso pianist, his writing for the keyboard is unsurprisingly idiomatic and effective. Who even knew that this arrangement existed? None other than the world’s most indefatigable transcription maniac, Cyprien Katsaris!
It would be enough for Katsaris merely to play the notes and to reasonably navigate the orchestral textures and vocal lines in pianistic terms. But this extraordinary pianist does much more than that. His variety of articulations and cantabile shadings create drama and character. For example, Katsaris’ supple repeated notes deliciously replicate cackling woodwinds, while he brings timbral distinction to each of La ci darem la mano’s dueting vocal lines. He sustains the long sextet Sola, sola in bujo luco by balancing the voices as if he were playing a complex Bach fugue.
It would be churlish to suggest that Katsaris’ limpid legato in Il mio Tesoro can make one forget John McCormack’s classic recording, but the pianist manages to do so, at least temporarily! The pianist’s inventive shaping of the extensive low-lying tremolos in Act 2’s Finale incisively vivify one’s image of the flames of Hell consuming the protagonist. Here the plangent sonority of the Polish Radio studio’s Bechstein concert grand is particularly beneficial.
Don’t expect to ever hear the Mozart/Bizet Don Giovanni played so well, or played again, for that matter. Should Katsaris decide to record Arnold Schoenberg’s piano duet transcription of the complete Rossini The Barber of Seville, I know at least one Classicstoday.com writer and fellow pianist willing to lend a pair of helping hands….
