Monday 15th October 7.30pm

St John the Baptist Church, Hatherleigh

BBC Radio 3 Piano Season

Live in Concert from the Two Moors Festival

Huw Watkins

Robin Holloway

Gilded Goldbergs

op. 86 (1992-97)

A re-composition for two pianos after J. S. Bach

Robin Holloway

During Radio 3's 2012 Piano season Monday nights will be 'Piano Night' when Live in Concert will offer listeners a series of unique piano recitals, from different corners of the nation, given by an array of international artists. In this concert, one of the six to be broadcast, Ashley Wass and Huw Watkins team up to perform Robin Holloway’s pianistic tour-de-force “The Gilded Goldbergs”.

The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, is a work for harpsichord by Johann Sebastian Bach, consisting of an aria and a set of 30 variations. It has been freely re-composed for two pianos after J.S.Bach

In Robin Holloway’s words: “It seems both odd and foolish to take one of the acknowledged pinnacles of western music and ‘recompose’ it. My excuses are, first, that Bach was himself an eager transcriber and transformer of other men’s music; and, second, that his own has been so very adaptation-friendly down the ages.

My own Goldberg adventure, in upshot huge and deliberated, actually began with comparably modest aims. Frustrated as a single pianist by inability to clarify the close-weave canons or manage the more fiendish hand-crossing numbers so idiomatic on a two-manual harpsichord, I began to transcribe a few for the domestic medium of two pianos.

I’d begun with a straight transcription of the first canon; but what had begun in functional obedience turned almost at once towards ‘re-composition’ and eventually drew miles away from the first modest aim, to grow into something more ambitious than I could possibly have imagined.”

Tickets: £12