★★★★☆ An almost perfect evening of Germanic musical accomplishment.

Melbourne Recital Centre
July 25, 2016

The latest serving of international pianism in the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Great Performers series saw three epochs of Germanic musical talent under one roof: two of the most important keyboard works in the Western classical canon – Bach’s glorious thesis on the power of musical invention, The Goldberg Variations, and Beethoven’s idiosyncratic late masterpiece, the Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor – performed by German pianist Lars Vogt.

Superficially, the aesthetic distance between Bach and Beethoven is vast, but these two pieces, rarely presented side-by-side, share some uncanny sympathies. Both pieces stand with their toes on the edge of a musical era; Bach, inching from the Baroque into the Classical, while Beethoven brazenly cannonballs from the Classical into the Romantic. Both explore the notion of thematic transformation, although Bach certainly trumps Beethoven in a straight-up contest of exhaustive reinvention. They share an abundance of ornamentation, albeit with quite different objectives. Bach’s meticulous notation of decorative flourishes in The Goldberg Variations is uncharacteristically assertive among other Baroque works, while Beethoven’s use of long trills in his Sonata reveal a nostalgic regression...