This weekend, I will be playing in a "Top 10" of pieces that have been voted somewhere at sometime by a poll of Bach's greatest hits. It's a sort of outdoor, cross genre concert that festivals sometimes like to put on... in order to be edgy or to "appeal to all tastes". I'm not really sure that that sort of thing works very well... but I know that I'm biased! So, the concert will be a set of pieces that will be performed by a Baroque ensemble and a Jazz combo.
It is the sort of thing that can sometimes work... with preparation and planning. But the arrangements are at best... pretty amateur. Take for instance, this Goldberg variation... which is normally a piece for keyboard (harpsichord) with the wide range and interplay between the hands that that implies.
The arranger has just plonked each hand onto a separate instrument, treble in one instrument and bass in the other... and then split it into two different duos and then called it a day for this variation. This is the sort of thing that might expect for "arranging" music if you were a seven year hold that just learnt how to use Finale or some music editing software.
If you don't take into account the ranges of the string instruments (in this particular case, two bass viols in the first half and a viola/cello duo in the second), you end up with music that is impossible to play as the instruments do not have the lower range... or is stupidly difficult and just sounds crap because it sounds like an elephant is trying to be a fairy on tiptoes (aka, bass instrument playing up in the soprano range...).
So, after our group played through this particular arrangement... it was universally agreed that it was just terrible... but that we needed to make it work. The biggest problem was the first second was just way too high for a bass viol to play the treble line... and so our first solution was to do it on viola... but that was also too high, and it was just not sounding great.
The second solution was to pair the lower bass viol with a violin playing the treble part... but then enough of the notes were missing on the lower end to make it not worthwhile.
So, we broke for the day with several alternative solutions in mind for the problem first half. The bass gamba player would get his treble viol from his home in France (he was going home an
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