Artwork by Damian Wojcik, hard copy purchases include high-quality digital download (stereo and binaural versions). 

The very idea of tackling J.S. Bach's cornerstone of keyboard repertoire, the Goldberg Variations, places an enormous psychological “weight” of tradition on any keyboard player brave or foolish enough to do so. However, rather than presenting this work as a fixed artefact behind dusty museum glass or trying to match existing interpretations, I find that it helps to view it as a living and evolving organism.

Karlheinz Essl’s Gold.Berg.Werk (“gold mine work”), a new piece in its own right, takes the Bach as a point of departure and offers a fresh perspective. Essl respectfully incorporates stunning electronic interludes with a spatial dimension, moving sound between the piano and the audience. A small transducer is cleverly hidden inside the piano, using the resonant properties of the instrument to amplify the sound, which is also panned behind and above the audience through a distant “lontano” loudspeaker. While no recording can approach the intimate immediacy of a live performance, you will still get an idea of movement in our binaural version, recorded at the Sonic Arts Research Centre in Belfast during the difficult September of 2020. I like to think that Bach, ever the experimentalist with structure and textures, would approve.

Xenia Pestova Bennett, 2021

Copies signed by Xenia Pestova Bennett and Damian Wojcik are available through the artist's website.

Digital / streaming and unsigned copies are available directly from the label here.