Complete recordings of great works such as Bach’s sonatas, his “Well-Tempered Clavier,” or Chopin’s “24 Preludes” occupy a unique place within the history of musical recording. It’s in their entirety that they are most unique and powerful, whereas in the purity of their repertoire, individual pieces are generally regarded as being largely heterogeneous. These timeless compositions transcend their authors and are given new life with each interpretation, and such is the case with Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Published in 1741, as the fourth and last part of his Clavier-Übung, the “Goldberg Variations” still remain, almost 300 years later, amongst the baroque master’s most important works, not only for the history of musical composition and recording in general (Glenn Gould, Trevor Pinnock, Rosalyn Tureck, and many others come to mind), but also for Víkingur Ólafsson in particular. “I’ve been dreaming of recording this work for 25 years,” says the Icelandic pianist, thus confirming that these studies are more a life’s work than a whim.Beginning with a melody that’s simple in appearance, the work is spread over a total of 30 variations, becoming a masterpiece of complexity. Determined, at surface level, by a rigid formal framework, the material itself nevertheless demands a “sort of interpretive improvisation”. Ólafsson recognises this paradox and makes it his own not by interpreting the different variations with technical precision and a strict loyalty to the metronome, but rather by following cyclical impulses and organic interpretation. At the same time, he evolves with the work and transcends it, whether in the creativity of the fugues or the complexity of the different canons, which influence one another, rely on one another, and, finally, like a parabola, return to the first melody and the beginning of all that had transpired previously -  like the ebb and flow of the Icelandic ocean, whose waves we know will always return to shore, but whose calm or strength we can never be sure of. © Lena Germann/Qobuz

While Glenn Gould's 1955 debut recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations has attained legendary status, there are many devoted fans who rank the 1981 recording just as highly, even though it offers a dramatically different interpretation. This album was made shortly before the pianist's premature death at age 50, so it is significant for being his last recording; indeed, the opening measures of the Aria are carved on Gould's headstone, in final recognition of the work's importance to him, so these two recordings may be regarded as bookends to the pianist's extraordinary career. Gould's tempos are slower and more measured in the 1981 performance, and the observance of some repeats here also differs from the earlier version. On the whole, the 1981 performance is reflective and carefully considered, in contrast with the technical brilliance and impulsive energy of the first. Gould's background humming is common to both Goldbergs, and even though the technology existed at the time of this recording to remove it, Gould kept it in, for fear of losing the piano's full sound. This eccentricity may be off-putting to some listeners, but there are so many fine points in Gould's playing that it must be overlooked to appreciate the true value of his playing and his understanding of Bach, which is original by any standard. Columbia's reproduction is crisp and clear, in keeping with Gould's wishes.© TiVo

One may well wonder why (or whether) a non-keyboard version of Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, arguably at the apex of the entire tradition of keyboard music, is at all needed. However, Baroque violinist Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque member Chad Kelly, who "reimagined" the work (arranged is not a strong enough word), offer several justifications for their deployment of the Variations across various kinds of chamber music here. "Despite what many respected and respectful commentators have propagated," Kelly says, "it is not a sacrosanct work of pure, absolute and abstract art." Kelly seeks to use the varied settings to clarify Bach's counterpoint, to examine the musical influences that were in the air when Bach wrote the work, and to "be idiomatic to the historical instruments used in its performance and to the individual styles and genres referenced in the work." All this involves rewriting certain passages. That is a lot to ask, but generally, Kelly and Podger make it work. There are just 18 tracks, with several variations often combined into a little suite. This tends to deemphasize the tripartite structure of the variations, with a canon every third variation. Listeners can make up their own mind about that, but most will be impressed enough by the smooth Baroque winds in the slower variations, especially the crucial Adagio Variation 26, that they will be won over by this unorthodox effort. This release made classical best-seller charts in the autumn of 2023.© James Manheim /TiVo

To record the Golberg Variations, the absolute pinnacle of western works on harpsichord and the apotheosis of the Baroque era, is the ultimate dream for many musicians. Lang Lang, who admits to have studied the fourth section of the Clavierübung by the Cantor of Leipzig for over twenty years, is no exception. This collection offers two interpretations of the same work. Firstly, a studio version, captured beautifully at the Berlin Jesus-Christus Kirche in March 2020 under the supervision of Christopher Alder, in which Lang Lang displays more measured tempos, particularly in the the initial aria and the first variation. This approach begins to animate itself more in the next section before the first variation in G minor which is slow, sluggish-sounding and unrelenting, taking on a stubborn and repetitive saraband rhythm - a remarkable conclusion to the first section. The outburst of the French Ouverture of Variation 16 is nothing short of spectacular. The following variations pass quickly before the second variation in G minor (Var. 21, Conone alla Settima.), with its very depressive phrasing, an imaginary Tombeau which momentarily instills an impressive gravity. Lang Lang nevertheless remains indifferent to the intrinsic structure of the Goldberg Variations, organised into ten successive groups of three variations with each group finishing with an increasingly complex canon (from the Var. 3’s Canone all’Unisono to Var.27’s Canone all Nona). For the Chinese pianist, his expressive heart seems to concentrate on the three minor key variations, and he doesn’t hesitate to project a Baroque expressionism that finishes the Golbergs with a touch of pathos and romanticism alongside a rounded and silky sound.The energy of the Leipzig public, on the 5 of March 2020, adds a welcome characteristic. During the concert, recorded by Philip Krause, who also accompanied Alder during his studio recording, Lang Lang has fun with the polyphony, beginning with the Aria. Here, he dances and injects subtle variations into the accents, thus opening up a wider and more diverse field of expression (Var. 1, Var. 7). Mischievous (Variation 23 has 2 harpsichords!), Lang Lang lets his imagination run rampant and the emotion that ensues is truly striking (Var. 21, with its obsessive delays). A certain weight is lifted, even in the way the harpsichord sounds, which bears witness to how the Chinese pianist’s sound has changed over the last fifteen years. © Pierre-Yves Lascar/Qobuz

Many concepts have been applied to the playing of Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, on the piano rather than the harpsichord for which it was originally composed. There are readings that attempt to restrict the piano's dynamic ambit to keep it close to that of a harpsichord, those that go full-on Romantic, and monumental takes that recognize the sheer unprecedented scope of the work. Fewer, though, are those that recognize the original story of the work's origin, recounted by Bach's early biographer Forkel: a Russian ambassador in Saxony, named Kaiserling, had trouble sleeping and prevailed upon a young pianist named Goldberg to serenade him to the land of dreams with a harpsichord, asking Bach to compose something for these sessions. The tale has been widely disbelieved, but there is no reason to suppose that quiet, intimate Goldberg Variations are any less valid than an epic one. That's what's here from German pianist Lars Vogt, who manages the neat trick of delivering a truly pianistic interpretation without turning it into a Romantic one. He does so by keeping the volume low throughout and by reining in the temptation to make the big minor-key variations at the middle and end into anguished dissonant cries. Instead they are moderate in tempo and quietly dreamy, to delightful effect, and one might indeed imagine the insomniac Russian count drifting off to them. In general Vogt's treatment is straightforward, with nothing brought so far to the fore that it would interfere with the considerable contrapuntal detail that emerges naturally from the individual variations. With excellent engineering from Ondine, working in the Deutschlandfunk Chamber Music Studio in Cologne, this is a highly recommended tonic to grandiose Goldberg Variations played on whatever instruments.© TiVo

Composer Józef Koffler was the first Polish champion of Schoenberg's 12-tone system and a modernist whose work, based on this fascinating transcription of Bach's Goldberg Variations for harpsichord, BWV 988, is likely to be worth further investigation. He ran afoul of Stalin's Soviet Union and then, worse, of the Germans when they took over Poland, and he disappeared in the Holocaust. The Goldberg arrangement, composed in 1938, was perhaps intended as something palatable to Soviet conservatives, but it is in no way done by the numbers. For one thing, when Koffler composed the work, the Goldberg Variations were quite new in the public consciousness; they had received their first recording, from harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, just five years earlier. Koffler's version, for a small orchestra of strings and winds, was forgotten and was premiered only in 2019, by many of the forces on this recording: it is extremely artfully done. Koffler deploys his ensemble, generally speaking, in three different ways: with the strings taking Bach's melody line, with wind-and-strings atomization of the melody, and with counterpoint mainly in the winds. He is inspired by the broadly tripartite structure of the variations, with canons mostly making up every third variation, but he departs from this where Bach does, and the entire set retains the unity and growth of the original, with complexity and expressivity growing as if inevitably as the music proceeds. The work would make an ideal complement in concert to Anton Webern's arrangement of the fugue from Bach's Musical Offering, BWV 1079. Historical performance veteran Trevor Pinnock leads a mixed ensemble of young musicians, consisting of members of the Royal Academy of Music Soloists Ensemble and students at the Glenn Gould School in Canada, and they play with precision and a fine edge. The Linn label delivers superbly detailed sound from the Britten Studio in Snape Maltings, UK, and the album graphics, showing a Chagall-like shtetl painting by the similarly doomed artist Chara Kowalska, are haunting. A unique release, fully deserving of the commercial success it has received.© TiVo

“I like challenges,” says the 23-year-old Italian pianist Beatrice Rana. Specifically, she enjoys studying and performing music that allows her to embark on a process of deep exploration. The scores for her first Warner Classics recording, released in late 2015, were two formidable and spectacular Russian piano concertos – Tchaikovsky No 1 and Prokofiev No 2. Her performances with Sir Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia led Gramophone to describe her as “a fully developed artist of a stature that belies her tender years,” and to conclude that “I can’t think of another recent concerto release that, beginning to end, affords greater pleasure.” For her new Warner Classics release she has taken on a very different challenge in the form of quieter, less obviously virtuosic masterpiece from an earlier era. It also happens to stand as a pinnacle of the solo keyboard repertoire: Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Bach was the composer who most obsessed Beatrice Rana as a child, and in a recent interview with Pianist magazine, she confessed that it would be his music, and above all the Goldberg Variations, that she would choose if she had to devote her life to a single composer. As she said: “I’m very happy to be going back to Bach … It’s best to avoid Bach in competitions … you can’t expose yourself to be totally killed by the jury! But Bach is my first love; now I am allowed to play it in public and I’m really looking forward to that.” When it comes to competitions, she speaks from experience. She first came to international attention in 2011, when she won First Prize and all the special jury prizes at the Montreal International Competition. Two years later she won the Silver Medal and the Audience Award at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Her exceptional achievement and promise has also been recognised by BBC Radio 3, which has named her one of its New Generation Artists, and by the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, which has awarded her a fellowship. Le Monde, France’s most authoritative newspaper, observed that “Beatrice Rana certainly has nothing left to prove when it comes to technique, but what makes an impression are her calm maturity and her sense of architecture.” When she played the Goldberg Variations at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in October 2016, the Bachtrack website – which gave her performance a five-star rating – highlighted her capacity for turning her dazzling technique to interpretative ends and praised the way the apparently instinctive fluidity and energy of her playing was combined with articulacy and an elegant sense of discretion. In her native Italy La Repubblica has described Rana as “the world’s point of reference for excellence among Italian pianists”. When she performed the Goldberg Variations in Vicenza in November 2016, OperaClick wrote that “Rana showed that she had understood the intimate dual essence of the Goldbergs, which oscillates between conceptual abstraction and emotional sensation, and had miraculously found a point of contact between two apparently antithetical worlds.” The previous month, she had played the work in Pisa. The Tuscan newspaper La Nazione spoke of her as a pianist who “amazes with her virtuosity, technical precision and mastery of her instrument”, while the writer for Tutto Mondo described the concert as “one of the most extraordinary performances I have ever witnessed ... her technical control, the crystalline purity of her touch, her clean execution, her deep and intelligent understanding of the score and her splendid musical taste permeated every page, every phrase, every note of the Goldberg Variations.”

Pianist Fazil Say is hardly known for playing Bach; in fact, his last Bach release before this 2023 release came in 1998, and he can be plenty idiosyncratic when he wants to be. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, affected Say as it did everyone else, and he spent a good part of it in intensive study of Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988. Those who shy away from Say's excesses can rest easy here; the intensive studies show up in what is a rather detailed reading, and even his famous Glenn Gould-like humming is minimized. Say says (now there is an awkward phrase) that he spent considerable time weighing details of articulation and dynamics in some of the variations, and while this perhaps comes at the expense of the overall line, it makes the counterpoint clear and provides some quite memorable passages. Sample the 20th variation for a purely pianistic extravaganza. The effect is somewhat similar to Gould's recordings of the work, especially the first one, but Say is less resolute in imposing his own personality. The biggest question mark here is the sound; Say served as his own producer in a Turkish arts center, with flat results and even a bit of distortion at the piano's top. Nevertheless, Say fans will be delighted, and even others will find that this stands out from the common run of Goldbergs.© James Manheim /TiVo

 A few weeks after the release of pianist David Fray’s magnificent performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Goldberg Variations, Jean Rondeau’s harpsichord versions were released on the same Erato label. Two proposals, two visions, two perspectives. Whilst David Fray takes his listeners on a long, emotional journey (which could even be classed as a sort of “Winterreise” before its time), Jean Rondeau instead takes inspiration from Scarlatti. The harpsichordist’s version of The Goldberg Variations almost feels like a response to the thirty Essercizi per gravicembalo (“exercises for the harpsichord”), a selection of thirty sonatas composed by the Italian and published in London in 1739. The Goldberg Variations were published in 1741 as the fourth part of the Clavier-Übung (a German term meaning “exercise[s] for the piano"), though the date of their initial composition may be earlier.Less concerned with the structure of the ensemble as some of his colleagues, Jean Rondeau expands upon each variation, making each one sound completely different, yet still beautifully complete—just like a sonata by Domenico Scarlatti. The Frenchman isn’t the only one to offer such a proposal either, with Ignacio Prego (Glossa) also releasing his own version of The Goldberg Variations back in 2015. Jean Rondeau’s harpsichord is of unparalleled beauty, having been built by Jonte Knif & Arno Pelto and based on a German model. The incredible sound recording immerses the listener into the very heart of the instrument, a hypnotic experience which causes all concern for logic to fade away. Rondeau plays with rhythm, reinvents dance patterns and offers a stunning portrayal of each of the Veränderungen throughout this anthology which exposes Europe’s musical preferences during this era. You’ve likely never heard the Variation XIV like this before (not even Pierre Hantai’s (Mirara) version comes close), it’s so unrestricted and free. Moreover, the expressive scope of the minor variations is simply breath-taking (variation XXI. Canone alla settima). It’s impressive from every standpoint and never fails to intrigue. © Pierre-Yves Lascar/Qobuz

Acclaimed for his recordings of the organ works of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Rübsam has also recorded some of Bach's keyboard music at the piano, though this 2018 Naxos album of the Goldberg Variations (Clavier Übung IV), BWV 988 is his first recording on a Lautenwerk or lute-harpsichord. The instrument was built for Rübsam by Keith Hill, following period specifications, and this modern copy offers crisp Baroque sonorities that permit the freely played melody and counterpoint to be heard clearly. The single-manual instrument's gut strings provide two timbres, and a set of brass strings provide sympathetic vibration to the rather dry plucked sound, giving it the ringing quality needed for cantabile playing. Rübsam also plays up the lute effect by articulating the voices with slight arpeggiation, which also gives a looser, nearly improvisational feeling to the voice leading and embellishments. Because the Goldberg Variations have been transcribed and arranged for many instruments and various combinations, this release may seem yet another attempt to bring novelty to an overly familiar chestnut. But Rübsam's unerring instincts and consummate artistry make this performance much greater than a gimmick, and listeners who prefer hearing the variations on a harpsichord will find the Lautenwerk to be a refreshing source for new ideas and expressions. Highly recommended.© TiVo