Stringing the Variations

The Arts:Listening to pianist Glenn Gould play Bach, Dmitry Sitkovetsky realised the work was a string trio 'waiting to be uncovered', he tells Michael Dervan.

Violinist and conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky traces his particular love affair with Bach's Goldberg Variationsback to Glenn Gould. Strangely, though, it's not the Canadian pianist's career- launching 1955 recording which affected him, but the later one, made in 1981.

"When I heard that second recording, it was quite a revelation, and also the video which Bruno Monsaingeon did. I became obsessed with the piece.

"I bought the score, and I started listening to it while on tour. It became clear to me after a while that, for the most part, it was written for three-part counterpoint. And being a string player, of course I wanted to be part of it. One day, in December '83, I just set out to write it out for string trio."

Sitkovetsky was performing string trios at that time, "so the sound was maybe in my ears".

"It was really an experiment, just for my own amusement, in a way. But it was the most glorious time I've spent in anybody's musical company, because it was Johann Sebastian Bach and Glenn Gould on a daily basis. I couldn't wait till late at night; I would get to the next variation and see where it took me. Some of the decisions I made accidentally, I have no idea how I came up with them. They just had to be done."

The feeling he had was that "it was all there, waiting to be uncovered". When he finished, he borrowed a viola to make sure that the most difficult passages were actually playable, and then he had a run-through with his string trio colleagues, cellist Misha Maisky and viola player Gérard Caussé.

"They were at my house, and I said 'listen, guys, I did something quite unusual'. They were laughing, saying 'you must be out of your mind'. It took a while, but they were in my house in Wiesbaden, and they had nowhere to go, as we were there to rehearse. So I actually sat them down, and we read it. They were pretty amazed that it actually sounded good too."

In what sounds like the proverbial blink of an eye, the new arrangement was being performed. It was recorded and out on disc in time for the Bach tercentenary of 1985. And it was in print, too, issued by the Viennese publisher, Doblinger.

"I was in a state of bewilderment. It took on a life of its own," says Sitkovetsky. It's even had the peculiar distinction of being taken up by performers on period instruments.

Sitkovetsky knowingly incorporated flavours from his favourite Gould recording. "Some of the spellings of the ornaments are distinctly his, because his 1981 recording was the one I was listening to," he says. "The transcription is absolutely connected to him. There are some things that you would know as his signature. Some of the tempi were impossible to emulate, because he just goes like a bat out of hell. Other things I found surprisingly well-suited for the violin.

"The way Gould played the Goldbergs, what made him stand apart, was that each voice had its own character, its own personality, timbre, if you will. Which is incredibly difficult if you have just a keyboard. Of course, it's much easier, and it's called for, if you have three different timbres: violin, viola and cello. And then when the same material goes from one instrument to the other, sometimes you want to disguise it because it's just one line, but at other times, when there is interplay, you hear the polyphony so much better, so much clearer than on a harpsichord or on the piano."

No one delves at all deeply into Bach without encountering his numerological preoccupations. The obvious division of the Goldberg's30 variations is into 10 groups of three. But Sitkovetsky points to another way of looking at them.

"Bach clearly establishes a pyramid, or a Christmas tree, if you like," he says. "You have the theme, then you have 15 variations, followed by a completely new start with a French Overture in Variation 16. That's the first half of the piece, the foundation."

The second section, he says, is 10 variations long, ending with Variation 25, which is "the third and most important minor-key variation and the emotional centre of the piece. After that comes the final part".

So we have 15, then 10, then five. Isn't that a perfect pyramid? "Nobody told me that," Sitkovetsky says. "I came up with it all myself. And there is something else which most violinists don't know. He's used that system before, in the Chaconne in D minor for solo violin. This has exactly 30 variations. And wouldn't you know, the D major middle part comes after variation 15, and ends with variation 25!"

This is all said with a triumphant air by the man who has already added to the well-documented three-ness of the piece by the simple and extraordinarily successful expedient of arranging it for string trio.

Julian Rachlin (violin), Maxim Rysanov (viola) and Mischa Maisky (cello) play Dmitry Sitkovetsky's arrangement of Bach's Goldberg Variations at the National Concert Hall, Dublin, tonight at 8pm. Michael Dervan gives a pre-concert talk at 6.45pm. www.nch.ie; 01-417 0000.