Latent Meaning: Performances as Authorship, Transcriptions as Intrepid Exploring

C    an Bach’s famous keyboard variations actually be improved? . . . it depends what you mean by ‘improved’. If ‘given a fresh new perspective’ qualifies, then the answer, according to this CD, is a resounding ‘Yes’! Hearing three distinct voices instead of one truly enhances the experience of listening to this classic. So how did Dmitry Sitkovetsky transcribe it? Violin & viola for the right hand, cello for the left? It would be nice if it were that simple. Sometimes the treble line involves the viola and violin, sometimes just the violin. In the case of Variation 19, Sitkovetsky does something quite impish. He sneaks pizzicato figures into the counterpoint mixture, so that when the violin and viola are conversing, the cello provides background plucking. But wait! That’s not all! A few bars later, the pizzicato is traded back and forth among the instruments, only to fade in and out of prominence. And it all happens in less than two minutes. Other dazzling feats occur in this performance. The centerpiece is the haunting Variation 25, the longest (7:39) adagio in the piece. Harpsichordist Wanda Landowska called it ‘The Black Pearl’, perhaps for its deeply affecting, melancholic beauty. The trioists inject it with an impressive array of dramatic techniques, like deft shifts from pianissimo to mezzo-forte and slight shadings in tempo. It almost sounds like a string trio piece from the late classical period. Why does this arrangement of the Goldberg Variations succeed so well? … the structure of the piece lends itself to three instruments, not one. When played on keyboard instruments, the two upper voices are virtually indistinguishable [but in string trio the voices are each more distinct].”
  —  Peter Bates, review of Rachlin et al., AudiophileAudition, 11-JAN-2008.

I f you haven’t previously heard Dimitry Sitkovetsky’s transcription of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’ (BWV 988) for string trio [see links below], you will, I think, be pleasantly surprised. I particularly like the Deutsche Grammophon recording of the performance of it by Julian Rachlin (violin), Mischa Maisky (cello), and Nobuko Imai (viola).


    [50-sec clip, Julian Rachlin et al, Sitkovetsky transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for String Trio, ‘Aria’, 1.2MB MP3]

It is amazing how well-suited the variations turn out to be for strings. Sitkovetsky’s transcription is an expecially thoughtful and innovative one, which teases out new expressive elements that previously have been only ‘latent’ and never realized when played on a harpsichord or a piano.

New meanings that have lurked in Bach’s text for almost 270 years become apparent, even obvious. New kinds of tension—melodic, harmonic, textural, and metrical—that contribute to the music’s overall effect begin to take hold of us.

Dmitry Sitkovetsky was born in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1954 and is a Russian violinist and conductor. He grew up in Moscow, studying at the Moscow Conservatory. When he wanted to leave the Soviet Union in 1977, he feigned mentally illness, was granted permission to emigrate to the U.S. and studied at Juilliard. In 1979 he won first prize in the Kreisler Competition in Vienna. From then on he has appeared as soloist with renowned orchestras around the world. He was the Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Ulster Orchestra from 1996 to 2001 and was Conductor Laureate of the orchestra during 2002. Since 2003, he is Music Director of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Russian State Symphony in Moscow.


Each of the trio parts avails the player the opportunity for an expansive response to the text, as well as challenges to maintain a good blend and ensemble. Rachlin sounds especially intense and personal here, which is what one always wants from a performer. The prodigious insight of Sitkovetsky’s compositional decisions is ample justification for what might otherwise have been thought to be an ‘unnecessary’ transcription of ‘Goldberg’. Once you have it, you realize that you needed it all along...

Bach’s two- and three-part keyboard writing for most of the ‘Goldberg’, so double-stops might be thought to be the natural approach to a string trio transcription that would render the harmonies in the original text. But there is far more here than that. Sitkovetsky emphasizes the dialogues in the counterpoint by exquisitely leveraging the timbral differences between the instruments. Rachlin, Maisky, and Imai are genuinely inspired by the ideas that Sitkovetsky has provided, as you will readily hear in their superb Deutsche Grammophon recording.

Variation 18 ending


    [50-sec clip, Julian Rachlin et al, Sitkovetsky transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for String Trio, ‘Variation 18’, 1.2MB MP3]

Variation 19 opening

Variation 19 ending


    [50-sec clip, Julian Rachlin et al, Sitkovetsky transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for String Trio, ‘Variation 19’, 1.2MB MP3]

Variation 20 opening


    [50-sec clip, Julian Rachlin et al, Sitkovetsky transcription of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for String Trio, ‘Variation 20’, 1.2MB MP3]

In trying to understand why the Sitkovetsky string trio transcription of the ‘Goldberg’—and the Rachlin et al. performance of it—are so novel and genuinely illuminating, I recall that Peter Kivy once noted that “the quality that persists through [Landowska’s] various performances of the ‘Goldberg Variations’: performance is to be valued not as process but for the interpretation it embodies.” Kivy argued that performances are full-fledged ‘versions’ of works in precisely the same sense as arrangements are—performance becomes a vicarious act of composing. It is that full-fledged creativity that we hear here.

S    o in the case of the Goldberg, there is in fact one pulse, which—with a few very minor modifications—mostly modifications which I think take their cue from ritards at the end of the preceding variation, something like that—one pulse that runs all the way throughout.”
  —  Glenn Gould, interview with Tim Page, 1982.

Rachlin plays the opening aria with what feels to me to be just the ‘right amount’ of circumspection. The introspective sensitivity and exquisite variety of touch that Maisky and Imai achieve are a joy to hear as well. The transitions between Variations are well thought-out and deliver a perfectly coherent, consistent sense of ‘pulse’ from one Variation to the next—consummately Bach-like. The rhythmic alignments, Variation-to-Variation, amount to a kind of [64-bar] hypermeter that threads its way throughout the aria, the 30 variations in all their diverse 2-beat and 3-beat and 4-beat meters, and the da capo restatement of the aria. Click on the image below to open an Excel spreadsheet showing color-coded alignments of the tempi between Variations, as they are rendered in the Rachlin et al. recording of the Sitkovetsky transcription for string trio.


To Kivy, music is never dominated by the text in front of us; music is performance and is therefore irreducibly ‘social’. It involves a direct and private communication from composer/transcriber to listener. The intelligibility of the piece is negotiated in real-time—none of the social participants has ‘omniscience’, or a privileged perspective of meaning and intelligibility.

How, after all, could we know would we know what Bach intended? All sorts of evidence, sure—some of it fragmentary, some flawed. So the musical text is under-determined with regard to performance practice, and performance interpretation can never be a matter of absolute ‘correctness’ but rather one of rigorous ‘coherence’ and thoroughgoing ‘genuineness’.

W hich is what we get here, in the Sitkovetsky played by Rachlin et al. Performers-as-composers/improvisers. Performers and transcribers as explorers, discovering new [historically informed] territory as they go.

This wonderful string trio transcription of ‘Goldberg’ convinces us that a piece of music is better considered as a ‘script’ rather than a ‘text’. We must not be relentlessly clinical or obsessively literal, focusing on the text as the ultimate source of truth and aesthetic value. To do that would be ruthlessly sterile and anti-musical, as Glenn Gould once said. This Sitkovetsky strikes me as one of the most ‘genuine’ transcriptions of anything, ever. Absolutely wonderful, and a fine ‘tool’ by means of which it’s possible to discover yet more meanings in a work that we might previously’ve thought we pretty thoroughly understood…

• Julian Rachlin—Born in 1974 in Vilnius, Lithuania, his parents emmigrated in 1978 to Austria. In 1983, he entered the Konservatorium Wien and studied with Boris Kuschnir and Pinchas Zukerman. In 2005, Rachlin made his Carnegie Hall debut when he performed with the New York Philharmonic under Maazel. Rachlin also performs chamber music with such artists as Martha Argerich, Itamar Golan, Natalia Gutman, Gidon Kremer, and used to perform with Mstislav Rostropovich. In 2000, he joined Rostropovich and Yuri Bashmet, among others, in the premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s Sextet. The same year, Rachlin also founded his own music festival in Dubrovnik, ‘Julian Rachlin and Friends’. In 2000, he was rewarded with the prestigious International Prize of the Accademia Musicale Chigiana of Siena. Julian Rachlin plays the 1741 ‘ex Carrodus’ Guarnerius del Gesù violin.
  
• Mischa Maisky—Born in 1948 in Riga, Latvia, Mischa Maisky began his musical training at Riga’s Music School and Conservatory. In 1962 he enters the Leningrad Conservatory. In 1966 he won first prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and began his studies with Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatory. He was imprisoned by USSR authorities for 18 months and emigrated to Israel in 1973. He has maintained a busy and illustrious performing and recording career ever since.
  
• Nobuko Imai—Born in 1943 in Tokyo, Imai began her training at Tokyo’s Toho Gakuen School of Music and soon after came to the United States where she studied at the Juilliard School and Yale University. She won first prize at both the Geneva International Music Competition and ARD International Music Competition at Munich. She taught as a Professor at the Detmold Academy of Music from 1983 to 2003, and currently teaches at the Conservatories of Amsterdam and Geneva, and at Conservatoire Supérieur et Académie de Musique Tibor Varga in Sion.

• JulianRachlin.com
  
• MischaMaisky.com
  
• Nobuko Imai page
  
• Sitkovetsky page at Nonesuch
  
• Clarke U-F. Review of Rachlin et al. performance of Sitkovetsky's Goldberg transcription for String Trio, MusicalCriticism.com, 26-NOV-2007.
  
• Rachlin J, Maisky M, Imai N. Goldberg Variations, Arr. String Trio (Sitkovetsky). (Deutsche Grammophon, 2007.)
  
• Trio Accord. Goldberg Variations, Arr. String Trio (Sitkovetsky). (Skylark, 2008.)
  
• Trio Echnaton. Goldberg Variations, Arr. String Trio (Sitkovetsky). (Coviello Classics, 2008.)
  
• Trio Zilliacus-Persson-Raitinen. Goldberg Variations, Arr. String Trio (Sitkovetsky). (Caprice, 2007.)
  
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