@ Buy Tickets! Doors open at 6pm, Concert begins at 6:30 | Advanced Tickets: $30 | Door Tickets: $35 | $15 for students and free for kids under 10 at the door Bach’s Goldberg Variations hold a peculiar place in the repertoire: endlessly analyzed, yet somehow endlessly mysterious. Written in 1741 for two-manual harpsichord, the work unfolds as an Aria followed by thirty variations — canons, dances, character pieces, a boisterous quodlibet — before the Aria returns at the end, the same notes now carrying the weight of everything that has come between. Dmitry Sitkovetsky made his string trio arrangement in 1984, dedicating it to the memory of Glenn Gould, whose two landmark recordings (1955 and 1981) had done so much to place the Goldbergs at the center of musical life. The dedication is fitting: like Gould, Sitkovetsky is less interested in replication than in reimagining. Distributing Bach’s voices across violin, viola, and cello transforms the music in subtle but profound ways. What was crystalline and percussive on the harpsichord becomes warm, breathing, sustained. The counterpoint — always present in the original — becomes something you can almost see, each voice now embodied by a different instrument, different timbre, different physical presence on the stage. The result is not Bach updated or Bach reimagined so much as Bach heard differently — as if a familiar room has been entered through a new door. Program: J. S. Bach, Goldberg Variations (1741), arr. Sitkovetsky Artists: Yoonhee Lee, violin Ken Hamao, viola Joseph Gotoff, cello The Outer Cape Chamber Music Festival at PAAM brings world-class chamber music to Provincetown through an intimate concert series that uniquely integrates with the museum’s visual art exhibitions. Led by cellist Joseph Gotoff, the series features concerts over two weeks in early summer, performed by world-class musicians with ties to Cape Cod. Each concert is specifically curated to converse with the art on display at the museum.
