Zing go the strings of this harpsichord

Of course, economies of scale come into play. In the dinkiness of the East Neuk, where venues are more makeshift than mega, one man and his harpsichord are all it needs to make an emphatic impression on the landscape. The man charged with doing so tonight, as the popular Fife festival gets under way at Crail’s modest parish church, is harpsichordist and conductor Richard Egarr.

He is slightly apprehensive about the challenge facing him – Bach’s intricate set of variations runs for a mammoth 90 minutes – but that’s not unusual. Several years ago I spoke to pianist Murray Pariah prior to his UK-wide tour of the Goldberg. He confessed that learning it had taken over his life, and had involved having a complete year off anything else to concentrate solely on getting to grips with Bach’s contrapuntal jigsaw.

Egarr is no less respectful of its pitfalls. “It is the ultimate head-f***,” he says with unexpected candour. “It’s a scary piece to play. The challenge is that Bach, in such a complicated score, poses so many questions, but doesn’t give you many clues on how to answer them. You have to figure the whole thing out for yourself.”

You’d hardly think so to listen to the piece made so famous in the 1950s by the Glenn Gould’s revealing but hugely eccentric recording. The simple sweet aria that forms the embryonic theme, and launch pad for 30 skilfully woven variations, is Bach at the height of his genius – where harmony and counterpoint, self-expression and self-discipline, fantasy and intellect, co-exist in perfect equilibrium.

“It’s not something you can ever feel comfortable playing,” Egarr warns. “The first 20-25 minutes are terrifying; you never know what is going to happen. At that point I often think I’d rather be playing the Well-Tempered Clavier Book 1,” he adds, referring to Bach’s sequence of preludes and fugues. “They are friendlier pieces to perform.”

Egarr is well up for the Goldberg. As a soloist he is exhilarating to watch and listen to. If he chooses to introduce his performance – as he did entertainingly in an appearance he made as soloist/director with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra a couple of seasons ago – that will be every bit as seductive as his undisputed dexterity at the keyboard.

His secret with this work, he says, is to make it sing. But that’s a tall order, surely, on an instrument whose reinstatement during the recent decades of early music scholarship and rediscovery has suffered bad press, not least through Sir Thomas Beecham’s famously disparaging comparison to “skeletons copulating on a tin roof”.

“You don’t do the music any favours if you play it as an instrument that simply goes ‘ping’,” says Egarr, in a turn of phrase typical of his off-beat banter. “It’s perfectly possible to make it sing. You simply have to play it as a harpsichord, and not as a typewriter.”

It’s in that respect that he shies away from Gould’s clinical, black-and-white version of the Goldberg. Fascinating though that is, he says, it’s not how he sees it. “You have to ask yourself about this piece, what is it? And what it is is an aria set out as a screwed-up sarabande. If you keep those key factors in mind – the lyrical life-blood of the aria and the rhythmic side-step of the sarabande – then Bach’s epic scheme makes complete sense.”

With such a colourful approach to his solo activity, it’s perhaps not surprising to find Egarr equally busy these days in the broader role as conductor of his own band. And it’s not just any old band. Five years ago he succeeded the legendary Christopher Hogwood as director of the pioneering period instrument ensemble, the Academy of Ancient Music (AAM), and has successfully stamped his own hallmark on its expanding activity and repertoire.

Climbing into Hogwood’s shoes was always going to be a challenge – a bit like someone taking over the Monteverdi Choir from Sir John Eliot Gardiner. “But I do what I do,” says the pragmatic Egarr. “Christopher and I are very different people. He was incredibly important at the start of the early music movement. I have my own aspirations.” These include, amazingly, the first ever recording by AAM of Bach’s B minor Mass and the forthcoming first performance of a Paganini violin concerto played with 19th-century period instruments.

In Fife this week, Egarr’s single conducting appearance – on Friday in St Andrews with violinist Isabelle van Keulen and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – is a much more eclectic affair, featuring music by Bach and Schubert (his Unfinished Symphony), as well as Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending and John Adams’s Shaker Loops.

“I’m having fun just going and doing all sorts of repertoire,” he says.

Elsewhere in this year’s East Neuk Festival, which runs until Sunday, the pattern is very much according to the formula that has made it such a growing success. Resident too will be the Quatuor Ebène (performances today and tomorrow of Mozart, Borodin, Beethoven and Debussy), the Elias String Quartet playing Beethoven and Mendelssohn quartets, and the Orlando Consort singing a Requiem by Ockeghem and Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame.

Expect scintillating chat from pianist Christian Zacharias, who, in his third residency at East Neuk, combines solo and chamber music performances with an illustrated lecture on Getting to grips with Brahms.

There’s more Bach – the Patitas – from pianist Aleksander Madžar, and this year’s festival art exhibition focuses on linocuts, ceramics and paintings of local East Neuk artsist Hilki MacIntyre. Tonight’s theme and golden variations could almost be a metaphor for entire event.

lThe East Neuk Festival runs from tonight until 3 July in venues around Fife. For tickets, tel: 0131-473 2000 or visit www.hubtickets.co.uk. Full programme at www.eastneukfestival.com