Review: Bach: Goldberg Variations (Mahan Esfahani)
And so one of today’s most singular young harpsichordists comes to one of the most singular works ever written for the instrument, JS Bach’s Aria with 30 Variations, aka the Goldberg Variations. The legend, propagated by one of Bach’s great early biographers Forkel, is well-known. In 1741 an insomniac Count von Keyserlingk of Dresden commissions from Bach a work which the Count’s harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, subsequently performs for his master to while away the sleepless hours. Now considered an apocryphal story, it is no less attractive for that. But one thing is true: that in the last century and this one at least, both exponents and listeners of the piano or the harpsichord have spent many an hour in thrall to one of Bach’s most original and grandly conceived work for keyboards. Whether playing Rameau and CPE Bach or Steve Reich and Górecki, the Tehran-born Esfahani always seems to be asking not whether he has something new to say about the music but whether the music has something new to say to him. In other words, a merely novel interpretation isn’t the endgame – though it may be a byproduct. The aria, a stately sarabande that encloses the… Continue…