Tomeu Moll-Mas

Scratching Goldberg

INFORMATION

The music of Johann Sebastian Bach has eternal qualities, for that reason it can be combined and fused with several musical genres and styles. The repertoire Scratching Goldberg creates around the Goldberg Variations a little “musical theatre” built with pieces of sonorous art with the piano played in non conventional forms, melting together Bach with the world of noise.

To manipulate the piano we have to use extended techniques: In this concert we use balloons, percussion sticks, polyethylene foam sheets, the fingers on the strings to produce harmonics, etc. The extended techniques allow us to obtain unexpected sounds from the instrument, conditioning the audience's attitude.

At the same time, the concert acquires theatrical qualities: The relation between pianist and listeners evolves in parallel with the specific interactions between instrumentalist and piano. Thus, the show becomes a kind of musical drama started with Notes für einen Pianisten for speaking pianist, and it closes with Surface, a piece that can be conceived as an improvisation before the Goldberg's Aria da Capo.

For all these reasons Scratching Goldberg is a “per-version” of the Goldberg Variations, a piece of pianistic theatre and sonorous art for piano and sticks, balloons, nails, blu-tak, canons, gigs and improvisations...