Musically Speaking

Well, this has been fun. We decided, since we could, to enjoy this as a long project. It’s a long and many faceted piece, and a miracle of imagination and ingenuity, so it deserves months of marinating. Not that it is new to all of us — our cellist, Natasha, spent years rehearsing, performing and recording it in the earlier part of her career in Oslo, Norway, and now she’s enjoying a return to it with the fresh eyes and ears of different colleagues. Meanwhile, Lucy, our violinist, has an encyclopedic knowledge of various recordings of it in all its known forms — for harpsichord, piano and string trio.

A little background here — what we are playing is a transcription  by the violinist, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, who made his version in memory of Glenn Gould (whose early and late recordings of the piece began and sealed his fame). So it’s a string trio which refers to a piano version of a piece for harpsichord. Layers within layers.

For us the question that comes up is how to balance our relationships with each of these ancestors. Bach made different versions of many of his own works so that, for example, there’s a fine concerto that one can listen to in his versions for either violin or harpsichord and be convinced that each is the original. There’s a level of imagination at work which goes beyond merely transcribing the notes from one instrument to the other — each version is fully idiomatic for the instrument. This was also Sitkovetsky’s  task, and it’s a mark of his success that his trio version has had a distinguished life of performance and recording since it was published in 1985, just after Gould’s early death.

So, underlying our discussions are the questions of how much to think about Sitkovetsky thinking about Gould. For some music lovers Gould’s two versions are like two books of a bible — the older, more bombastic and self-consciously idiosyncratic Gould seeming to chastise and correct his more naive younger self. In choosing particular string textures, is Sitkovetsky hearing the choices Gould made on the piano, and should we be taking Gould’s often extreme tempi into account when we choose our own?

Over the weeks it has become clear that our (perhaps unspoken) instinct is to find our way directly back to Bach’s own text, using Sitkovetsky’s very skillful transcription less as an interpretation and more as our vehicle, making our own decisions about articulations (mostly this means when to put in and take out slurs) based on our knowledge of the original harpsichord writing and our judgment about how best to realize it on string instruments. And if we see some subtle rewriting which we think sounds more elegant and more faithful we feel free to do so.

Lucy, Natasha and I have enjoyed playing string trios several times since Natasha and I moved to Boston in 2005, so we began the Bach with a sense of familiarity with each other as a trio. And yet, and this is from my viola perspective, it was immediately clear to me that it felt different from other string trios. What strikes me is that the viola part is only sometimes a viola part — it’s not conceived, like most viola parts, to provide a different, perhaps warmer contralto voice than the violin. Instead, it very often has to be heard as an equal and very similar voice to the violin as the two instruments go through Bach’s sequence of canons at every interval. So I find myself playing many passages on my top string in much higher positions than Lucy needs to be for the same notes. And so my challenge is to try to resemble the sound of a violinist easily running around in first and third positions on the E string, while I’m playing in 5th and higher positions on my larger instrument — are you feeling sorry for me? I was at first (feeling sorry for myself). For a few days I tried a fine 5-string viola and there was no doubt that the higher passages fell much more easily into the hand. But the instrument I borrowed hadn’t been conceived for classical use, and I missed the depth and body of my own instrument in the lower passages. And it was surprisingly confusing having to think about where my D string was. So I returned happily to my own viola and I’ve enjoyed getting a little fitter as I train in the higher altitudes.

One more note about our process — since so many of the variations are strict canons between the top two voices above wonderful running cello parts, Lucy and I have found a technique to make sure we are playing the voices as similarly as possible. We simply get Natasha to stop what she’s doing and listen to the two of us playing our parts simultaneously instead of at the interval of imitation Bach has written. This enables us to compare bowings, phrase shapes and articulations instantly, with Natasha’s ears guiding us from the middle. Since Bach goes through all the intervals of canon possible, this leads to some weird sounds as we play, seriously and musically, whole beautiful variations in parallel major seconds or 7ths. We can only hope nobody is eavesdropping on our rehearsals!

Roger Tapping