Leonhardt Goldberg

Who needs another recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations? After all, there have been so many great recordings of the work already – Landowska, Kempff, Gould, Pinnock, and Leonhardt, to name a few – that surely no one needs another recording of the Goldberg. Actually, everyone needs another recording of the Goldbergs provided that it's a recording of a great performance. There's too much in the Goldberg – too much brilliance, too much sorrow, too much humor, too much spirituality – for any one performance, even the best performance, to contain all of it. So long as the performance honors the work's honesty, integrity, and virtuosity, there's always room for another Goldberg on the shelf. This 2001 recording by Andras Schiff belongs on any shelf of great Goldbergs. Schiff has everything it takes – the virtuosity; the integrity; and most importantly, the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual honesty – to turn in a great Goldberg. Indeed, Schiff has already done so in his 1982 Decca recording of the work, a lucid and pellucid performance of tremendous beauty and depth. But as good as the 1982 recording was, the 2001 recording is better.

The recording speaks for itself, and it is only a matter of months before it shares the Olympus of the Goldberg with Leonhardt, Koopman, and Hantaï. This is so because, difficult as it may seem, Bonizzoni manages to offer a new perspective which avoids all straining after effects and extravagance to present a magical, intelligent, subtle, solid, coherent, and current version.

Alan Curtis (November 17, 1934 – July 15, 2015) was an American harpsichordist, musicologist, and conductor baroque opera. Born in Mason, Michigan, Curtis graduated from studies at the University of Illinois, and received his PhD in 1960 with a dissertation on the keyboard music of Sweelinck. He then relocated to Amsterdam to work with Gustav Leonhardt,[1] with whom he subsequently recorded a number of Bach's concerti for harpsichord. In the 1960s and 1970s, he made a number of recordings of solo harpsichord music[2] including albums dedicated to the keyboard music of Rameau and the works of Johann Sebastian Bach, such as his recording of the Goldberg Variations made on a 1728 Christian Zell harpsichord.

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.

This fascinating set provides a refreshing window onto a much studied, much idolized, and oft performed master of composition, allowing many of his familiar works to appear in a new light, recognizable and yet transformed. Bach's music is often described as indestructible, in the sense that no matter how it is performed, or in whichever arrangement, it's essential spirit survives. Many of the transcriptions included here represent the work of contemporary, world-class performers bringing Bach's masterpieces into the repertoire of their own instruments or ensembles, thereby giving new timbres to the genius of Bach's contrapuntal lines.