The Lark by Mikhail Glinka/Mily Balakirev

by Scott

In some ways, it is more challenging to arrange a solo work for 4-hands, than a work featuring multiple instruments reduced down to 4-hands. As an arranger, I don’t want to impose too many new ideas onto an original solo work, but at the same time would like to make use as much as possible of all of our hands! I didn’t want to just put the solo version’s left hand part in the secondo and right hand part in the primo throughout the piece, so I sometimes had to try out different writing techniques to keep things interesting. Here are some examples:

The first 4 bars of the original solo version

The first 4 bars of the duet arrangement

This passage feels like a dialogue between a singer (first 2 bars) and a bird (upper part of bars 3-4), so putting these two melodies played by two different people seemed like a good choice.

The main melody of the piece

This is typical of solo to 4-hand transcriptions: the melody is played by one hand in the primo part, and the secondo divides the original left hand part into both hands. Later on in my arrangement, I did some octave doubling of the melody to keep the primo’s left hand occupied.

Here, the melody starts in the right hand, and continues in the left hand while the right hand embellishes with a scale passage.

The melody is doubled in octaves, and the bass is transposed down an octave. The primo part has the original scale, but with an added voice a third under so that the left hand had something to do, and to increase the richness of the texture.

This passage is already quite complex in the solo version and uses what is called a “three-hand texture”, where a melody is played in a middle voice with figuration going on around it in both hands. Notice the appearance of the bird theme at the end of the passage in the left hand.

I wanted to keep the feeling of virtuosity in this passage rather than simply dividing both parts into a 4-hand texture, so I added new material in the primo part based on the bird calls, and the secondo part plays the solo part almost identically, but with the right hand an octave lower. The third bar of this passage changes into the simple division of parts that I generally tried to avoid doing!

The main feature of the climactic passage is the leaping in both hands

I wanted to include a feeling of risk in both parts, so I retained the jumps and off-beat bass notes, while adding a 3 against 4 rhythm, and expanding the range outward one octave in both directions.

Near the end, there are some more bird calls, with register changes.

Like the opening passage, this feels like a dialogue between two characters, so I put the alternating phrases in separate parts, without changing any notes. Having two people at one instrument makes it easy to depict a musical conversation!