JS Bach - Goldberg Variations (arr. for koto) | Continuo Classics CC777727

JS Bach - Goldberg Variations (arr. for koto)

£11.35

In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day

Label: Continuo Classics

Cat No: CC777727

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Instrumental

Release Date: 12th March 2021

Contents

About

Mieko Miyazaki makes us discover her version of the Goldberg Variations on the KOTO! An artistic feat of a very high level by an exceptional performer. A fantastic CD which proves that Bach’s music is timeless and obviously multicultural.

“While I was intensely practicing the koto to enter the Conservatory in Japan, I discovered, on my father’s recommendation, the recording of Goldberg Variations made by Glenn Gould in 1981. This album, which fascinated the whole world, had a considerable impact on the high school student that I was.

“While transcribing the piano score, I had to adapt music composed for an 88-key keyboard and requiring the use of both hands, for an instrument played with three fingers on 13 strings. It is therefore virtually impossible to play all the sounds of the original score. Moreover, when we reduce the Koto chord, traditionally based on a pentatonic mode, to a diatonic scale, the extent is thus reduced to an octave and a half, which creates a consequent lack in the low ranges and acute. The particular technique of koto consisting in using the left hand resting on the strings in order to raise the note by a semitone makes it inevitable, in any transcription for koto that certain sounds of the original text therefore remain missing. Remember that the compositions for this instrument are traditionally based on 13 notes ...

“Determined, despite the technical difficulties, to live the Goldberg Variations solo, in 2002 I started to transcribe the first variations. After what seemed to me to be an interminable process of research and testing, I completed, 15 years later, the transcription of the entire work. The great blind master Yatsuhashi Kengyo created the koto style that currently exists in Japan, a style that has been passed down from generation to generation from the 8th century onwards; The year 1685, marked by the death of Yatsuhashi, is also the year of birth of Johann Sebastian Bach. I have always felt something deep in this coincidence.”

– Mieko Miyazaki

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