Re-Discovering Bach

Our Thirty-Second BCMS Season begins with a program consisting of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Mendelssohn’s D minor Piano Trio. It is a program that highlights the simple act of rediscovery we each experience on hearing again a work or composer whose work we thought we knew. This program contains many such levels of re-discovery. First and foremost may be in the pairing of the two composers: Mendelssohn is credited most for re-introducing to the public the music of Bach eighty years after his death.

Pianist Randall Hodgkinson has in recent seasons been on his own personal quest of re-discovering the Goldberg Variations, performing them in the solo piano arrangement on a faculty recital at the New England Conservatory of Music, on the radio in WGBH’s Fraser Studio and at various concert venues throughout New England. Originally written for harpsichord with two manuals or keyboards, any pianist who wants to play them on piano will first have to arrange how to avoid collision of the two hands when the score asks him/her to play in rapid succession the same notes in the same registers.

In our twenty-seventh season BCMS programmed an arrangement of the Goldberg Variations for string trio by the noted violinist, Dimitry Sitkovetsky. On hearing this arrangement and the one for solo piano played on the same program at a Montreal Chamber Music Festival concert, the inevitable question arose about how these two arrangements played by alternating successive groups of variations between piano and strings might work. Last Spring Randy and I had the opportunity to find out in a performance at Holycross College with violinist Carol Lieberman and cellist Jan Mueller-Szewars. The combination and contrast of colors was revelatory–as much about how to rediscover and enjoy the intricacies of the work as about how to play Bach authentically–with none of us playing the original instrument! Bach was known for making arrangements and alternate versions of his own works as well as those of others for different instruments.

Even though they were the largest collection of variations on a single theme at the time, the Goldberg Variations were not the first nor last to use the theme that occurs in the bass. With thirty variations in which to explore every mood and psychological state you can find elsewhere in his entire corpus, from the most exalted spiritual to deep depression to raucous mockery, Bach is not done yet. The presence of twelve canons on the same theme written to follow the Goldberg Variations shows his imagination and skill to be inexhaustible.