Trevor Pinnock and RAM - Bach: Goldberg Variations - Baker & Taylor CD Hotlist

Józef Koffler was doomed. As a gifted composer and champion of the Vienna school (Schoenberg, Webern, etc.) and the European avant-garde, he had a target on his back from the moment Stalin came to power. And as a Jew living in Poland at the time of Hitler’s invasion, he spent years on the run before being arrested and executed by the Gestapo in 1944. So this recording of his remarkable chamber-orchestra arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations is a bittersweet event, one that reminds us of the all-too-brief career of a remarkable musical talent, a career made artificially briefer by the fact that he destroyed many of his early works in response to pressure from the Soviet government, and was severely constrained in his musical activities during the few years he survived under Hitler. The source material for this music is, of course, one of the towering monuments of the keyboard repertoire, the Mount Everest that looms on the horizon for all serious pianists. Arranging this theme with its 30 variations for the multifarious voices of a chamber orchestra (one that includes not only strings but also flute, oboe, English horn, and bassoon) creates opportunities and challenges that few composers could have tackled as creatively and pleasingly as Koffler did; Bach’s celebrated voice-writing is made clearer and more colorful by the distribution of lines to instruments with widely different sonorities, and Koffler’s distinctively mid-century style adds another dimension of new color to what are otherwise very familiar melodic passages. To play this arrangement on baroque instruments would have been absurd and would have sounded bizarre; Trevor Pinnock leads a young modern-instrument ensemble here, and the sound is magnificent.