Instrumental transcriptions of Johann Sebastian Bach's keyboard music have been legion -- witness just how many there are of The Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue -- and yet very few of them seem to catch on. One notable exception is violinist and conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky's 1985 trio arrangement of the Goldberg Variations, made to observe Bach's tercentenary and as a memorial to pianist Glenn Gould, more readily associated with the Goldbergs than perhaps any other musician aside from Johann Gottlieb Goldberg himself ...
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Instrumental transcriptions of Johann Sebastian Bach's keyboard music have been legion -- witness just how many there are of The Musical Offering and The Art of Fugue -- and yet very few of them seem to catch on. One notable exception is violinist and conductor Dmitry Sitkovetsky's 1985 trio arrangement of the Goldberg Variations, made to observe Bach's tercentenary and as a memorial to pianist Glenn Gould, more readily associated with the Goldbergs than perhaps any other musician aside from Johann Gottlieb Goldberg himself. One reason that this arrangement has been so widely adopted -- and recorded -- is that it works; being able to hear Bach's polyphony as individual instrumental lines helps elucidate his contrapuntal thinking in a way that a standard keyboard performance can only partly convey. In Deutsche Grammophon's Bach: Goldberg-Variationen three very heavy hitters among chamber musicians -- cellist Mischa Maisky, violist Nobuko Imai, and violinist Julian Rachlin -- combine their considerable...
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