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Background: I had the score of the Goldberg Variations on my piano for twenty years before I dared open it. I'd always played a lot of Bach, ever since I was a little girl; but somehow the reputation of this piece intimidated me, so I got on with playing his other works - partitas, preludes and fugues, French suites and concertos, even the Art of Fugue (which is very daunting). Finally I opened the first page, to the Aria. G major is very kind, benevolent key, and the opening is intimate and confiding; the early variations are sunny, warm, humorous. Rather a like a cliffhanging plot, each variation somehow contains the seeds of the next one, until you're drawn into the deepest part of a labyrinth; the music grows complex, and turns dark, weary, tragic. But holding tightly onto the thread, we're out again, back with domestic life, singing the Aria once more. The music is the same, but we have changed. So the surprise is, then, that the Goldbergs manage to be both dreamlike and reflective – a nod to the fable they were written to cure a case of aristocratic insomnia – as well as earthy, discursive and playful. Boogie woogie players talk about having 'a left hand like God', and surely Bach's descending bass lines - the springboard for every variation, as well as contributing a witty commentary - deserve a whole study of their own. It also strikes me as an extraordinarily contemporary piece, by which I mean Bach imitates all his contemporaries (Scarlatti, Rameau, Corelli and Handel) but does them competitively better; and all to a self-imposed scheme, a set of rising canons every three variations. There's an unstoppable life force in the music, which encompasses despair and solitude, as well as joy. - from the liner notes by Joanna MacGregor. |
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COMPOSER: Johann Sebastian Bach |
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CATALOGUE NR: 2564683933