On Goldberg
“The pieces reveal a landscape of stark beauty”
«On Goldberg» will be released on Backlash summer 2020. Part two “On Palestrina” with Inga Margrete Aas og Jan Martin Gismervik will be premiered at Podium Festival Esslingen this year.
When Jan Martin and I started working on this project, the idea was quite simple: To perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations and rather than simply playing every note in the score, we would rather focus on musical development and the underlying principles of the piece. In other words, we wanted to explore why and how something happens rather than presenting only the happening itself. For me in particular (Jan Martin’s background is primarily with self composed or improvised music), this approach marked a big shift in the relationship to the score.
Page from our working score.
This starting point is of course much more open than it might seem at first, and we quickly faced the need to develop our own methods for how to process the material. First we settled on a couple of rules to lead us along the way:
1. Never to add any material; all music was to be derived in its entirety from the score.
2. Our approach should alway be logical and stay consistent within a variation, in concord with Bach´s own patterns.
With this as our foundation we started developing a kind of tool box with which we could attack the piece.
Working in this way (which was a completely new experience for both of us) can best be compared to looking at a familiar world through a continuously changing kaleidoscope. The music found - found is definitely the right word - this way seems to be both fully Bach, and at the same time something fully new. It feels completely structured but yet at the same time profoundly unpredictable. As this unpredictability is so present in the creation process, the resulting music keeps on fascinating us at every turn.
This project was premiered at the 10th edition of PODIUM Festival Esslingen, and the project was supported by #BeBeethoven.