Who is Pochacco

I found an arrangement of Rachmaninoff's 18th Variation on a theme of Paganini by Pochacco. Who is Pochacco? I saw no copyright notice on the arrangement; is it public domain?

 

What coincidence. Only yesterday I was browsing my Rachmaninov sheets collection and I (briefly) wondered about that name too. There's nothing to be found about an arranger by this name. It rather sounds like a pseudonym.

The arrangement is a bit of a joke, as this variation is chiefly written for piano solo, with only some supportive chords and figures from the orchestra which could easily be incorporated with the piano part, like in the Chopin concerti.

Whether it is public domain or not I could not say. The pieve being so popular, I'd not worry about it too much.

 

I appreciate your response.

I'm not sure what you mean by saying the arrangement is "a joke". Naxos has a very similar one (in the key of D, I believe) that seems good to me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR5VrAy9iXU

If I post my recorded performance of Pochacco's arrangement on my commercial website, and the arrangement is copyrighted, that creates a legal problem. Thus, I'd rather know for sure, but an extensive Internet search brought up no results for the identity of the arranger.

 

What I meant is that by the look of it, he just took the Rachmaninov score which is 95% piano solo and just added some chords and figures of the obbligato orchestra part. Can't have been a hard job. But really, what else could one do with this piece.

One would think that if this were copyrighted, then surely

1) A full composer name and publisher name would have been on the sheet
2) It would be for sale somewhere
3) Some info could be found on the web

I guess there may be no way to know for sure.

 

Not everything is on Google or Wikipedia or even IMSLP Why not start with wherever you acquired the score? or was it a "found in grandma's piano bench" sort of thing

 

I don't know where my copy came from. Could be some obscure Russian site, bootleg CD, or a torrent, I've tapped various sources over the years. I guess only the original uploader would know about it, but you'll not likely to find out who that was.

You could consider making your own transcription. It's not so much that needs to be added to the original score, I think.