Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker And Pianist Pavel Kolesnikov Present THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, BWV 988 At Sadler's Wells Theatre

Sadler's Wells International Associate Company Rosas returns to Sadler's Wells Theatre to present the UK premiere of The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's own solo piece, on Tuesday 6 and Wednesday 7 September.

De Keersmaeker pursues her dialogue with Bach's music with this new solo performance, after her 2018 work The Six Brandenburg Concertos, which was created for 16 dancers.

The Goldberg Variations belong to Bach's late period, in which the composer pushes the boundaries of musical themes in a play of variations, canons and fugues. For this composition, he started from a simple and quiet melody, joined with an underlying bass line that eventually reveals itself with extraordinary variety and complexity.

Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis (BWV) is a list of all the pieces of music by Johann Sebastian Bach that are known and grouped according to what kind of music it is. It translates to Bach Works Catalogue.

Following the score as the blueprint for choreography, De Keersmaeker works with pianist Pavel Kolesnikov in a piece where the dancing embraces the melody while retaining an immutable core. This is the first time Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Pavel Kolesnikov work on a project together.

Since her first creation to Bach with Toccata in 1993, De Keersmaeker's latest pieces mark a clear "stripping down" of her choreography to essential principles: spatial constraints of geometric pattern; bodily parameters of movement generation, from walking to dancing; and close adherence to a score for the choreographic writing. In 2013, she returned to Bach's music in Partita 2, a duet between herself and Boris Charmatz.

With this solo, the Belgian choreographer refines her ongoing quest for an idiosyncratic choreographic idiom.

London-based Pavel Kolesnikov was born in Siberia into a family of scientists. He studied the piano in Moscow, Brussels and at London's Royal College of Music with Norma Fisher. Today he is a Benjamin Britten Piano Fellow and as a recitalist, he has performed on all continents. He made his BBC Proms debut performing Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto no. 2 with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland in 2016.

Speaking about the piece, De Keersmaeker said: "After the Cello Suites and The Six Brandenburg Concertos I wasn't sure which music I would use for my next choreography. In the end, I went with Bach again because he is the composer par excellence of 'embodied abstraction', a key notion in my thinking about dance. Dance and movement are closely connected to all of Bach's music. There is also the rhetorical power of his music, which expresses universal, recognisable emotions. In Bach's music, everything is related to structure, but it is never systematic or predictable. At the same time, both the larger form and the details are characterised by clarity." 

"In the East, some believe that when you turn 60, you become a baby again and start a new life. The choreography to Bach's Goldberg Variations is an exploration of my own dancing and moving of the past 40 years."

Pavel Kolesnikov says: "For the interpreter, the work is evidently an exercise in technique, craftsmanship and taste. Some passages are extremely virtuoso. At the same time it is a spiritual exercise. The piece is about rising above, about aspiring and becoming better." 

To post a comment, you must register and login.