This content was created by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This content was uploaded by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This is a YouTube video titled "Bach Brandenburg Concertos: Piano Transcription Secrets REVEALED!" (uploaded 2025-05-23). The excerpt is a single-speaker English monologue by a pianist/transcriber describing their work transcribing Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos for piano four-hands. The speaker recounts problems with earlier Max Reger reductions (imbalanced primo/secondo parts), explains transcription decisions (preserving contrapuntal lines, removing some double notes and certain viola doublings), and summarizes the timeline and difficulty (about 3 months for one concerto, roughly 2 years to finish all six, with fast movements requiring advanced pianists).
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That is, to me, that will always be my most, you know, my biggest accomplishment, the Brandenburg Concertos. And, you know, I always tell the story, me and my piano partner at the time, we tried Max Reger's score many times and it was just not viable. So what he did wrong was, it was kind of like he just put all of the high notes in the primo part and all of the low notes in the secondo part. In effect, the primo part looks like this Amazon forest of notes, which completely obscures any counterpoint. So they're just clusters of chords because you have the violins playing, you have the oboes, and sometimes you have the trumpets. They're all scored differently. So it's impossible to play up-tempo and really convey the different lines converging, which is what he did for the orchestra. And the secondo part, the bottom part, very often just has octaves doubled because by virtue of it being low, nothing else was happening in there. So whoever's playing primo is completely frazzled and frustrated. And whoever's playing secondo is also frustrated for a different reason that they're barely doing anything. So I just transcribed one of the concertos of 2014 because I was presenting a series of Bach concerts concerts, and I wanted to do Brandenburg 2. And first I thought that I could just change it a little bit, looking at the score, but then I realized that I need to redo it because it— you need to enter things into software, and it just wasn't viable to change. So I did that one. It took me about 3 months. It was not one of the complex ones. And then after doing that and playing it at a concert, then people were saying, well, are you going to do all 6? You're going to do all 6? And I was like, Oh my God, am I going to do all 6? It took me a few months to get my readiness level to a point where I said, okay, I'm going to start working on this. And then it was about 2 years. It was an extremely difficult and involving process. And I'm still frankly amazed that I've done it because everything subsequent was not nearly as difficult. And these are written for advanced pianists? Well, again, I don't know what the designation would be because I just transcribed the music the best way I could for 4-hand piano. Some of the slow movements could be done by the intermediate pianists, but the fast movements are just, you know, the first third movements, they are very complex. And those are definitely not for, you know, students on the lower levels. Now, I didn't change anything. You know, I really tried not to eliminate anything except double notes and maybe the viola parts, you know, because everything there is so important.
