Pacific Baroque Orchestra tackles music director’s new arrangement of Goldberg Variations
Alexander Weimann’s fresh take on Bach’s “apex” of Baroque keyboard music is set to open Early Music Vancouver season
Alex Weimann with the Pacific Baroque Orchestra. Photo by Jess MacAleese
Early Music Vancouver presents the Goldberg Variations on September 20 at Christ Church Cathedral; the concert is now sold out. Tickets still available for performance September 21 at 3 p.m. at First Church of Christ, Scientist in Victoria
THERE ARE UNSOLVABLE musical mysteries surrounding Johann Sebastian Bach’s monumental set of keyboard studies, the Goldberg Variations. For instance, who premiered it? Not necessarily Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who is associated with early performances of the work but was not formally named its dedicatee when it was published in 1741. There are also various speculations concerning the occult or numerological significance of the Goldberg’s 30 variations—or is it 32, given that the score also includes a standalone aria, repeated twice?
None of these questions, however, have much bearing on the work’s beauty, its enduring popularity, or its seemingly eternal position in the pantheon of compositions for keyboard instruments. As the Pacific Baroque Orchestra’s music director, Alexander Weimann, happily agrees, it is lodged at or near the very top.
“It’s the apex, in a way, of the Baroque keyboardist’s repertoire—and beyond, obviously, because so many composers relate to it,” Weimann says in a Zoom interview from his home. “And although all the sources tell us that it was written for a two-manual harpsichord, it makes such beautiful sense on the piano. It’s only logical that the pianists are playing it.”
In fact, he adds, “There is no serious keyboardist that would evade this piece. At some point in their life, everybody faces it.”
Weimann himself is due to face the Goldberg Variations soon, albeit in a new form: his own arrangement, penned at Early Music Vancouver’s request, for eight of the PBO’s star players. (Featured at Christ Church Cathedral on September 20 will be violinists Chloe Meyers and Majka Demcak, Joanna Hood on viola, Elinor Frey on, cello; Soile Stratkauskas on flute, oboists Matthew Jennejohn and Lot Demeyer, and Ellis Reyes on bassoon.) But before we get into the specifics of this intriguing project, this listener has one more query, and it has to do with the written legends that have grown up around the Goldberg.
If we accept that the Variations were indeed written for the teenage Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, then under the patronage of the former Russian ambassador to the electoral court of Saxony, Count Hermann Karl von Kaiserling, we have to consider that Goldberg was often tasked with playing for the insomniac nobleman during his frequent sleepless nights. Fair enough. But certain of the variations have a restless, almost caffeinated exuberance to them—which in itself is not surprising, as Bach was an early and enthusiastic adopter of the Ethiopian bean, having written his Coffee Cantata not long before completing the Goldberg Variations. Other passages, Weimann says, “go as far into the dark side as you can imagine”.
Nether mode would seem especially well calculated to soothe Kaiserling’s aristocratic brow. What gives?
“At the risk of disappointing you,” Weimann says, laughing, “we don’t know how true that story really is. It was recounted by Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Bach’s first biographer, but in 1802. It’s a little bit like the Gospels talking about Jesus Christ; we take them with a grain of salt.
“That doesn’t mean to say that Kaiserling, the ambassador, was not enlightened and delighted with Goldberg’s playing of the piece,” he adds. “It doesn’t even mean that the insomnia part is not true. In any case, he wanted something—or he used the piece, to put it that way—to do what all music at that time was designed to do, which is to delight.”
Weimann makes no claims to have improved on Bach’s original with his expanded score. Despite reworking the Goldberg Variations for nine musicians rather than one busy harpsichordist, he modestly claims to have let Bach lead. “With some of the variations,” he says, “I had to look at them for quite a while—almost stare at them without intention and have them tell me what the possibilities could be to unlock them, as it were. In the end, I think I found a solution.”
That, he continues, involved another act of time travel: flipping forward from Bach’s Baroque era to the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. Sometimes, he explains, he’s cutting phrases “into very small sections and having them flip around between the instruments.
“That’s sort of a Classical string-quartet technique, and you find it in Beethoven and Haydn and all of them, but it’s not really Baroque. You find a little bit of it in Brandenburg 3 and in some larger-scale orchestral pieces, but it’s not very idiomatic in the realm of Baroque music. I used it a little bit, but I think that all the parts I came up with you could find in Bach’s sonatas, and that was my goal: to write something that’s not silly on Baroque instruments, but at the same time translates the much bigger range of the harpsichord to groups of instruments, [using] opposing divisions of labour a little bit.”
In essence, he’s assembled two quartets, one of strings and the other of woodwinds, with his own harpsichord as intermediary. “The string one is basically a string quartet; the woodwind one is flute, oboe d’amore, oboe da caccia, and bassoon.
“It is unusual,” he notes, “but also not unheard of; Bach uses that sometimes in the larger-scale pieces, even to a certain extent in Brandenburg 1. And with those two groups I thought I could do it. But I would almost not call it an arrangement; it’s a transcription, really. With some tweaking, but hardly ever.”
Friday’s concert will feature one major deviation from Bach’s plan: the PBO will close the first half with Goldberg’s own Trio Sonata No. 4 in C Major. But even here Johann Sebastian provided space: Weimann points out that the 15th variation has “a gentle, slightly sad, slightly melancholic feel, with a very open—you could even say inconclusive—ending.” This creates a window into which Weimann can introduce the Trio Sonata. After an intermission the program will begin again with Variation 16, which as a “French overture” offers an appropriate sense of a new beginning.
“Musically,” Weimann says with characteristic understatement, “I think it will be a very interesting experience.” 
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