Murray Perahia Goldberg Variations

Listen to the music first! Perahia's booklet essay is a dry musicological treatise concerned with technical aspects of Bach's music. His performance, on the other hand, is filled with life and excitement. The kind of overt virtuosity heard in some of these variations has been a rarity in Perahia's recordings, but it shows how wide a range he intends to cover in his playing of this masterpiece. Unlike Glenn Gould, who is most listeners' touchstone for piano performances of the Goldbergs, Perahia takes Bach's necessary repeats and uses them as occasions for adventure, varying not only the emphases, but also the actual notes.

Johann Sebastian Bach - Murray Perahia - Goldberg Variationen
EAC+LOG+CUE | WV: 240 MB | Full Artwork: 122 MB | 5% Recovery Info
Label/Cat#: Sony Classical # SK 892432 | Country/Year: Europe 2000
Genre: Classical | Style: Baroque, Piano

"…Artists as individually outstanding as Gould, Tureck, Koroliov, and Schiff have all found solutions that are equally valid, but none, I think, have ever made the music sound so naturally, joyously at home on the modern piano as has Perahia. With gorgeously rich recorded sound fully worthy of the interpretation, this Goldberg Variations easily joins my short list of recommendations on any instrument. Perahia has given us a recording for the ages, no doubt about it." ~classicstoday

Soloist-conducted piano concertos can sometimes mean compromise, even chaos…but not in this case. Indeed, the playing of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields under Murray Perahia is even sprightlier than on a rival EMI recording of the same repertoire where Sir Neville Marriner conducts and Andrei Gavrilov plays the keyboard part. As soloist, Perahia is his usual stylish, discreet and pianistically refined self. He takes the D minor Concerto’s opening at a fair lick, a hot-foot sprinter embellishing the line with taste and affecting a little ritardando at 3'21 (just as the mood momentarily brightens) a la Edwin Fischer.

This lavish box set contains a whopping 68 discs, a hardcover book, and five DVDs; in short, it's Murray Perahia's entire recorded career through 2010. Although the title says "The First 40 Years," the final disc in the set is a Vox Turnabout disc of Mozart chamber music that Perahia recorded with Boris Kroyt and Harold Wright in 1967, but not released until 1976. Chamber music is not something Perahia is usually known for, nor is vocal music.

There are many listeners who have come to cherish Murray Perahia's Bach, to treasure the fleetness of his fingers, the delicacy of his touch, and the beauty of his tone. There are many listeners who are deeply moved by Perahia's recording of the Goldberg Variations, who hear tragic depths in its first groups of variations, consummate wit in final variations, and heartbreaking nostalgia in the return of the theme.

A truly beautiful and unique tracklist with rarities including Víkingur Ólafsson’s new arrangement for piano of a Bach Cantata, rare transcriptions for guitar, for mandolin and even String Quartet; alongside familiar Bach masterpieces, all played by the world’s greatest classical artists, curated and presented Deutsche Grammophon.

Establishing a telling and plausibly individual post-Gouldian solution to the Goldbergs has unsurprisingly come more from the likes of pianists Angela Hewitt and Murray Perahia than a generation of harpsichordists, a view reinforced when one revisits the studied hauteur of Gustav Leonhardt’s pioneering 1964 recording (Teldec, 3/96 – nla). Amongst others, we have since recognised Pierre Hantaï’s decorous 1992 Gramophone Award-winning account for Opus 111, and yet even such a vital and alluring account as this has barely impacted on the ‘mainstream’ consciousness of the work’s interpretative possibilities. For all the technical differences between the piano and harpsichord which have contributed to such divergent lines of enquiry, this remarkable set of 30 Variations badly needs a harpsichord performance which projects the various layers of meaning and characterisation in a cohesive whole and, crucially, which makes the harpsichord sound warm, generous and palatable over 70 minutes.

A truly beautiful and unique tracklist with rarities including Víkingur Ólafsson’s new arrangement for piano of a Bach Cantata, rare transcriptions for guitar, for mandolin and even String Quartet; alongside familiar Bach masterpieces, all played by the world’s greatest classical artists, curated and presented Deutsche Grammophon.