Goldberg-Variations / Erz

There's an old anecdote that when Sir Edmund Hillary was asked "why" he climbed mountains, he answered "because they're there." That's the only reason I can imagine "why" so many musicians attempt to play JS Bach's "Goldberg Variations", his ineffable masterpiece for double-manual harpsichord, on every other instrument from Accordion to Xylophone. There are performances available right now on amazon of the Goldberg Variations played on marimba, moog synthesizer, guitar, modern string orchestra, saxophone quartet, brass quintet, viola da gamba consort, organ, harp, and a plethora of pianos. None of them, not one!, sounds as musically authentic or as emotionally satisfying as a fine performance on the instrument for which the variations were composed, so there's obviously a second question: "Why" do otherwise reasonable musicians, highly skillful musicians like accordionist Denis Patkovic, suppose that anyone could want to hear their efforts when they could hear a performance as astonishing as Bob van Asperen's Bach: Goldberg Variations, Toccatas on harpsichord? Why not some other 'mountain' to climb? Why do you almost never hear anyone recording Telemann or Buxtehude or even Handel on piano? Something about a "Mount Everest Syndrome"? Well, Bachophiles, there are people who shouldn't climb Everest, even if they can afford a team of a hundred Sherpas to drag them up and down, and there are NO instruments that can do justice to the Goldberg Variations except the harpsichord.

This performance on accordion is very crude. Unlistenable. And it's intermittently disrupted by bits of contemporary music for accordion titled Erz:Erz. It's not a sin to play around with great music, to whistle Schubert Lieder or whang out the Ode to Joy on a musical saw. But it's unkind to record it and sell it to an unsuspecting public.