The Arrangers United

The gesture that stuck with me the most was a very simple one: At the beginning of Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate’s arrangement of the final restatement of the theme, he suspends a single note high in the violins, held over from the end of variation 36. It hovers there, quietly persistent, for much of the theme, now part of the prevailing harmony now dissonant against it. There’s nothing like it in the piano version, nothing to even imply its inaudible presence. It gave me, in its way, exactly what I wanted from an orchestral arrangement of this quarrelsome classic: something the orchestra can do that a piano can’t.