Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
October 29, 2018

Legend has it that Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his ‘Goldberg’ variations – the fourth volume from his Clavier Übung – for the young keyboard player Johann Gottlieb Goldberg to play for his insomniac master, Count Kaiserling. “It’s rather hard to believe that this work could lull the Count to slumber,” New York-based Australian pianist Sarah Grunstein told the audience in the Sydney Opera House’s cosy Utzon Room, at her second of two concerts in Sydney this month. Indeed, Grunstein’s forthright rendition of the cycle, played without the score on a Steinway grand, was anything but soporific.

The opening Aria was broadly rendered, in a distinctive, weighty reading with plenty of personality, but it was the percussive first variation – the polonaise delivered with aggressive, punching energy – that set the tone for the rest of the cycle.

Sarah Grunstein. Photo © Peter Schaaf

Bach wrote this work for a two-manual harpsichord and Grunstein obviously has a keen sense of the composer’s interweaving lines and voices, but they were rendered here rather brutally at times, bass lines in particular hammered out with unnecessary power, gentler moments barely registering before giving...