Dazzling, delightful – and unfairly dismissed: Stephen Hough on the art of the transcription

Bach, Beethoven and Brahms did it. Liszt took it to such virtuosic heights that the entire genre almost collapsed. Ahead of his own album of transcriptions, the pianist and composer looks at the history of reworking existing music They have long been the norm in the world of jazz clubs and hotel lounges, but transcriptions in the classical world were for many years a bit of a naughty word – or at least a guilty pleasure. To arrange someone else’s music in a way they hadn’t originally intended, often with extravagant decoration, is still regarded in some quarters as displaying a lack of seriousness, a lapse of taste – or even as sacrilege. Listen to Mozart’s Don Giovanni in the hands of Liszt. The venerated 18th-century opera underwent a metamorphosis, becoming a blisteringly virtuoso potpourri, its melodies serving as mere launch pads for the most exaggerated form of showing off. Our jaws may drop with astonished delight but is it serious or tasteful? A condemnatory attitude used to be everywhere in the last century, especially in the German-speaking world, the shift in taste evidenced by how many recordings there were of transcriptions up to the second world war – and