Bach blows minds

Getting your head around the "Goldberg Variations" is like explaining the Milky Way

by Sam Knight / February 25, 2013 / Leave a comment

Bach's music is "intensely interior." How does it translate to the communal experience of a recital?

I don’t listen to enough live music, but who does? And of the tiny amount of live music that I do go and see/hear, it’s even rarer that it is the real core material, the songs closest to the heart. I can think of only one or two experiences of that kind, and they have been almost as unsettling as straightforwardly enjoyable. I couldn’t really believe what was happening when Dylan began to bark out “Desolation Row” in his gondolier’s hat and minimal moustache. You? Genius? Here? In Brixton? It didn’t quite compute.

So I just don’t think I had many cultural or emotional references when we booked to go and see the Goldberg Variations at Kings Place last month. Incidentally, what is even the right verb here? Do you listen to live music, see it, hear it, or just go to it? I know that you hear evensong, and I can see how classical music might fall into that usage, but I am not sure that you hear Bach. You certainly don’t see it/him or “go.” Who is travelling towards who? (On balance, I think you probably listen to Bach. You try to hear. You hope to hear.) Anyway, we really didn’t think very much about the whole deal. We looked at the listings for Bach Unwrapped. Got excited. Clicked on the Goldberg Variations dates. Love Goldberg Variations. Listen to Goldberg Variations a lot. In the car. In the flat. Got nephew a book for Christmas purely because the title was a pun on the Goldberg Variations. Also got nephew the Goldberg Variations (Glenn Gould, 1955). Nephew two months old. Never too young for Goldberg Variations. Anyway, we got tickets in the front row, went about our business, occasionally said things like, “Can’t believe we’re going to Bach this week,” and turned up a few minutes before it began.

If you haven’t been to Kings Place, it’s a bit like being inserted into the chamber of some large, as-yet-uninvented wooden instrument. We sat down, everyone was older than us, and then Miki Skuta, the pianist, appeared through a doorway onto the stage. In pictures, Mikuláš Škuta (Slovakian) looks like the knowledgeable virtuoso that he is. His website says it: “All-out gifted…

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Comments

NBMaggie
February 25, 2013 at 19:58
"...I find it intensely interior music. It gets in me immediately. The notes are like thoughts and there is such a pleasing simultaneous complexity and pattern that I find myself hooked up to something that feels like a larger and stronger mind: carried away and brought closer to myself at the same time." What a wonderful description of the experience of privately listening to moving music. The Bach B minor Mass, if it is the John Eliot Gardner version, is just such a piece for me. I will never tire of it; I can state this quite confidently although I've been enjoying it since its original release. Every audit reveals something new to revel in and to love.
Monty Johnston
March 3, 2013 at 00:53
Good. Glenn Gould hasn't been working for me. Too fast, alienated. I'm a Rosalyn Tureck fan. I hear her play a Bach piece and think, "Ah. So that's what that means." I'll listen to your guy.
Cross-Eyed Pianist
March 3, 2013 at 14:04
When one has the sense of an artist having fully inhabited, lived with, the music for a long time, amazing things can happen. It is that sense of "ownership" while not obscuring the composer's original intent that can make live music such an extraordinary and absorbing experience. A young harpsichordist called Mahan Esfahani impressed me with his own performance of the Goldbergs at Cadogan Hall in July 2011. His quirky, but no less authentic take on this iconic, monumental work, made the harpsichord seem modern, new, utterly spellbinding. If you don't like the harpsichord, Mahan will change your mind. One to watch IMO
Don Wagstaff
March 10, 2013 at 18:46
I too attended a life-affirming concert of the Variations, but in my case almost by accident. I saw at the last moment that Angela Hewitt was performing it (them?) in Manchester at 6.30pm on a Wednesday (I guess the reason for was that she was in town for a concerto with the Halle the next day). Now I know that she has been called 'Bach's representative on Earth' but the performance, preceded by a half-hour lecture on the piece which went right over me, was the most powerful of any that I have witnessed. The hall was in total silence until quite some seconds after the final notes and then exploded with applause. I accept that Angela Hewitt is a wonderful pianist but the work also has to play it's part - which it did for me on that occasion. I really must make more effort to hear it live again.
John Munro
March 11, 2013 at 22:54
I have to defend Gould. His 1955 recording is breathtaking. He was guilty of some awful lapses of judgement. He recorded some Mozart sonatas, for example, which had to be recorded as a joke. However, when he was good; he was sublime.

Bach blows minds

Getting your head around the "Goldberg Variations" is like explaining the Milky Way

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NBMaggie

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