Yeah, I love playing Bach. I've never been an exceptionally good sight reader, so I tend to learn blocks and eventually commit the entirety mostly to memory, using the score more as guide. But with Bach there's a particular logic that almost facilitates or prepares the player for subsequent moments. It's hard for me to articulate precisely what I mean by that, but I'm certainly not suggesting that it's in any way predictable. Rather, it's just make a sort of sense which I do not often pick up upon with other composers. (I think Douglas Hofstadter articulates this well in Goedel Escher Bach.)
When I was younger, I was completely unaware that when arrangers take a piece for organ, say, and adapt it for piano, they also make certain changes to compensate for differences in voicing. Busoni was notorious for taking some rather extreme liberties in this respect. I'll never forget the day I was listening to an organ performance of Toccata and Fugue in D minor, and I started noticing a few bits that seemed a bit simpler than what I had learned. At first my thinking was that the organist was perhaps slacking a bit, but upon delving into the matter I discovered that I had learned the piece from Busoni's piano transcription and he had actually added some bits in the Fugue section--mostly octave or fifth trilling type stuff. I felt cheated because the one I had been playing was a fair bit harder, but I got over it eventually.
I always preferred the Nice to ELP, and also some of Emerson's later soundtrack work. He had questionable taste, at times, but he was truly a virtuosic performer. Pulling off Bartok's "Allegro Barbaro" is no easy feat.
