The truncheon of the Bach police is becoming increasingly difficult to wave about. The pandemic has transformed the way that we make music; it has reconstituted the fabric of works close to our heart to a degree unimaginable by Bach who – as arrangers are quick to remind us – himself borrowed and rearranged his own compositions with seeming nonchalance. If the St John Passion can be reduced to an arrangement for three musicians, as it was earlier this year on Good Friday in Leipzig, then a harp arrangement of the Goldberg Variations barely shows up on the seismograph that measures such tinkering. It’s now over a decade since Sylvain Blassel and Catrin Finch released their Goldbergs on harp in the same month. And so, like London buses, this autumn finds the Goldbergs filling our ears once more. It takes some pages on a generic Google search to find press unrelated to Lang Lang’s double release (DG, 10/20) – what is it about the Goldbergs that continues to speak to us? Why now?

As I listen to Parker Ramsay on the harp, I’m reminded of an essay by TS Eliot in which he describes ‘what happens when a new work of art is created … the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered’. When Ramsay’s breath becomes another line of counterpoint in the ‘Canone alla quinta’ (Andante) of Var 15, for example, I’m brought back to my own discovery of the Goldbergs as a university student. I had yet to learn about Glenn Gould’s idiosyncrasies and so came away from the experience utterly convinced that my college room was haunted. Perhaps it’s a feeling that Ramsay shares: having the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, as a kind of second bedroom, this ex-organ scholar is all too familiar with ghosts of the musical past. It is therefore particularly wonderful just how much of a say Ramsay’s alma mater has in this recording, and by that I do not mean in terms of label management. Here the elephant in the room is the room: space in the musical argument is given to acoustical magic and it’s as if Ramsay convenes with Bach via the chapel. Some tempos are therefore slower than what we might be accustomed to, but the result is sometimes remarkably special: we are immersed in a scene we know well indeed, a daily walk perhaps, but the friction in our footsteps is dissolved. It is a sensation wholly different to the intoxicated engrossment gone adrift in Lang Lang’s studio recording (in which the Aria comes in at 5'21" – Ramsay’s is 3'23" – and the Aria da capo a ludicrous 6'21"). Although Jed Distler’s response last issue was more positive, to my ears Lang Lang fills the space between Bach’s notes with ego, a thoughtfulness that sounds feigned. Bent so out of shape, one loses track of the musical thread, of what is ornament and dissonance. Ramsay’s speeds are a discussion between Bach’s music and space; the chapel is enlisted as an agent with musical intelligence.

But, of course, the harp itself has much to do with this, too. The blurring of harmony and melody in Var 11 or the arpeggios and trills in Var 14 that furl in on themselves to create clouds of perfumed, wondrous ambiguity: Ramsay’s harp is a tiny chapel unto itself. Its undampened ringing, what Ramsay calls ‘overring’, sets such movements with unctuous intrigue. And then there’s the ping, that visceral ringing pluck that a harpsichord or concert grand can’t begin to match. These mini lightbulbs splendidly stud Var 7, dotting the landscape with delicate eurekas without agogic displacement. As these timbral mysteries become the sonic norm, ever so often Ramsay reminds us – in delightful opulence – that he is playing the harp. In Var 16 this emerges as a flamboyant glissando, in Var 28 as a murmuring river – a hushed conversation between thumbs and strings. There are movements where the listener is required to do (too much?) heavy lifting – navigating through the blurred chromaticism in Var 21 is considerable aural labour – and it is easy for the listener to disengage (wonderment goes somewhat astray in Var 12). More often than not, Ramsay picks us up in gusts of loveliness and all is good once more: an excellent debut solo recording.