A ‘Variations’ that Bach could love

Promising to give it “the full monty,” British harpsichord maestro Richard Egarr, making his first solo tour of the United States, will perform J.S. Bach’s masterwork, the “Goldberg Variations,” as well as the seldom-heard 14 “Goldberg Canons,” on Friday at the Doheny Mansion in Los Angeles.

Egarr, an internationally known keyboard virtuoso and conductor and the director of Amsterdam’s Academy of the Begijnhof, plays the “Goldberg Variations” using a tuning only recently published by harpsichord scholar Bradley Lehman.

Lehman decoded a “squiggle” on the title page of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” that he believes described the composer’s tuning system, Egarr explained in a phone interview.

“Other people have been trying to find Bach’s tuning,” Egarr says. “It’s a bit of a Holy Grail in a way.” Although not universally accepted, Lehman’s discovery is “quite a convincing and most brilliant piece of detective work. It really sounds fantastic in Bach’s keyboard music -- and that seems to me proof, if anything. It really does work with the music.”

The “Goldberg Variations” -- one aria and 30 variations -- “is an incredibly all-consuming journey,” Egarr says. “It’s the intellectual challenge of trying to understand how it’s put together and what Bach wanted from it, coupled with the purely technical challenge of playing it.

“I’ve found the hardest thing for me is actually settling into it. But once you’re on that road, it kind of carries you along. It’s a privilege to have such an incredible piece of art for the keyboard. It’s quite humbling.”

When it comes to Bach, however, Egarr is aware that for many people it is still Glenn Gould’s landmark piano interpretation that defines the composer’s sound.

“It colored people’s ideas, particularly about the Goldbergs and about Bach in general. [Gould] was an amazing musician, an amazing intellect, a total genius,” Egarr says. “But what he does on the piano is very different from how I feel the music should be performed on the harpsichord.

“The basic problem with the harpsichord is that it is the ultimate ‘machine that goes ping,’ ” he observes, with a laughing reference to a certain hospital scene in the film “The Meaning of Life” from Monty Python.

“If you play it in a very mechanical, rhythmically straight, dry and detached way, it sounds awful.”

The harpsichord is actually “a kind of keyboard lute, and you have to treat it as if it’s a member of that resonant family to make the instrument live and ring.”

During his tour, Egarr hopes to do some consciousness-raising about the harpsichord’s ability to “make music in a noble and rich way,” as he writes in the liner notes of his new CD recording of the “Goldbergs,” while bringing listeners along on the “amazing journey” that is the Bach masterpiece.

“It’s such incredible music.”