On ClassicsToday: Bernard Labadie's Orchestra Goldberg Variations Re-Issued

 Goldberg Variations Variations (Les Violons du Roy Edition)

Review by: Jens F. Laurson

Artistic Quality: ?

Sound Quality: ?

You name any instrument or combination thereof and I give you a recording of the Goldberg Variations to match it. Nearly, anyway. The good versions entice the ears or tug the heartstrings; here is a re-release that errs on the right side of success, adding its spin to old Bach’s perennial masterpiece. It’s the period band Les Violons du Roy performing an arrangement for strings and continuo, concocted and conducted by the orchestra’s founder/director Bernard Labadie. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this recording on Atma Classique was originally released on the Dorian label in 2000. It got a Classicstoday.com 10/10 rating then (see reviews archive) and the re-issue ... (Read the entire review at ClassicsToday)

Dip Your Ears: No. 262 (#GoldbergReflections)

J.S.Bach et al., Goldberg Reflections Niklas Liepe / NDR RPO / Jamie Phillips (Sony Germany)

There’s no dearth of Goldberg Variations in all shapes and forms. If you want to stick out of the crowd, and you haven’t Deutsche Grammophone’s marketing department behind you, you better do something pretty special. That’s what Niklas Liepe is trying to do, on this Sony-issued recording. For starters, the 30-year old is a violinist, not a keyboard player. Further, he doesn’t just play Andreas Tarkmann’s arragnement for string trio, orchestra and harpsichord (in essence a beefed-up Sitkovetzky arrangement), he also combines the 13 Variations which he chose for his project (plus the opening and closing aria, of course) with eleven newly composed, semi-precious Relflections-on-Variations. Hence the title of the record: #Goldberg Reflections.

From composers like Dominik Dieterle, Moritz Eggert, Friedrich Heinrich Kern, and Stephan Koncz, all the way to the fine epilogue of Konstantia Gourzi’s, we get an air of Piazzolla, wafts of glass-harmonica, and Schnittke-like molten intermezzi which, in their own, largely introvert ways, dance around the temple that is Bach. The fact that the actual Goldberg Variations morph into neo-baroque suites, brings them a few steps closer to some of these new compositoins. Open-eared Bach-lovers will find the whole project rather enjoyable; a diversion that’s certainly more diverting than hearing just yet another new recording of the real thing. The fact that Liepe performs his sometimes solistic, sometimes chamber-embedded parts impeccably – as do the strings of the NDR Radio Symphony Orchestra Hannover (themselves texture-enriched by the recurring harpsichord) – further helps the venture be a very happy listening-experience.

1/10

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On ClassicsToday: Mahan Esfahani’s Intriguing Goldberg Variations

Mahan Esfahani’s Intriguing Goldberg Variations

by Jens F. Laurson

From the start, harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani deviates from the well-worn, well-known embellishments and grace-notes in Bach’s Goldberg Variations as we know them through Grandmaster Glenn Gould and just about everyone since. The easily irritable Esfahani knows he isn’t the first to record these works, but... Continue Reading

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Dip Your Ears, No. 252 (Céline Frisch’s Goldberg Variations Re-Issued)

Johann Sebastian Bach, Goldberg Variations Céline Frisch (harpsichord) (Alpha)

In a Goldberg Variation survey from about ten years ago, I wrote that “Richard Egarr, who impresses with feeling and his soft touch, outplays the fairly similar Céline Frisch, who also includes the 14 Goldberg canons (although in a version for chamber group, not on the harpsichord as does Egarr) and the two songs on which the 30^th variation, the Quodlibet is based. The alpha disc, a CHOC de Le Monde de la Musique 2001 and Diapason d'or 2002 winner, is highly interesting for that reason, but the Goldberg Variations themselves cannot stand out in a crowded field. On the mellow side, they compete directly with the ultimately more expressive Egarr.“

I’m sitting in front of the re-release now, and appreciate what was then Céline Frisch’s first recording for Alpha a good deal more. Or I hear it differently now. The field is obviously still as crowded, but good harpsichord versions do stand out of the market and Frisch’s is at least one of the more interesting. She’s got a free, knotty, agogic way that I struggle to describe. Essentially it’s a stagger – that really enhances the feeling of the harpsichord’s plectrum plucking away at the string. Then again she does that throughout, in determined and unflinching manner, and I can see how this might sound one-dimensional to some. Those would be better off with Keith Jarrett, whose stagger on his very intriguing (and harpsichord-unorthodox) recording (ECM) is far more flexible. Frisch’s intra-phrase rubato is contrasted with a steady pulse of the Variations that keeps her on track. It makes her recording not one I would recommend to those seeking an ear-charming introduction to the Goldberg Variations played on the harpsichord (Egarr or Pierre Hantaï are better suited for that), but the determined harpsichord-loving Bachian should find it a delight.

That alluded-to inclusion of extraneous, Goldberg-related pieces could be the kicker to what is already one of the more satisfying Goldberg Variations on the harpsichord. And indeed, the inclusion on a second disc of the 14 Canons on the First Eight Notes of the Bass of the Aria of the Goldberg Variations, BWV 1087 (so far, so rare and good, thanks to Céline Frisch’s superb period band, Café Zimmermann) and the two German songs used in the Quodlibet of the Goldberg Variations: “Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben” (“Cabbage and turnips have driven me away”) and “Ich bin solang nicht bei dir g'west” ("I have been away from you for so long”) is most welcome. But unfortunately Dominique Visse, a character-counter-tenor whom I enjoy greatly in action, sings it in a mock-comic of faux-historic way (and with bad German), which rather ruins the listening to a popular, however comical, folk-song which I would much rather have sung straight. But that’s grumbling about the bonus encore.

8/9

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#morninglistening: The Tharaud Goldbergs

#morninglistening to @atharaud’s #GoldbergVariations/#Bach on @warnerclassics#classicalm… https://t.co/mw0r6tFkh9 pic.twitter.com/AuTEl5uBMk

— Jens F. Laurson (@ClassicalCritic) February 1, 2016

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Best Recordings of 2015 (#3)

Time for a review of classical CDs that were outstanding in 2014 . My lists for the previous years: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, (2011 – “Almost”), 2010, (2010 – “Almost”), 2009, (2009 – “Almost”), 2008, (2008 - "Almost") 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004.

# 3 - New Release

Johann Sebastian Bach, Goldberg Variations , (after Busoni’s Edition), Tzimon Barto (pianist), Capriccio

Johann Sebastian Bach, Goldberg Variations (after Busoni’s Edition) Tzimon Barto (pianist) (Capriccio)

This is wacky stuff that will horrify the purist: First it was Ferruccio Busoni, the Germano-Italian late-romantic composer and pianist who got a hold of them and made his very own edition of them. Double an octave, add a trill, spell out dynamics… that sort of thing. Then Tzimon Barto, known for doing things his way, goes from there and gets playful with it. A reviewer of this disc, unimpressed, suggested that “the wilful treatment betrays Baroque sensibilities”. Incidentally I agree, but I think we have a different meaning of “betray” in mind. I happen to think that this indeed wilful, this liberal, almost naïvely sensuous, improvisatory, on-the-moment, whimsical way with the work is, in its 21st century way, a very close approximation of the fluidity that distinguished baroque attitudes. (One need only think of the traditions of ad libitum adornment.) It does betray baroque sensibilities in Barto, whether he’s aware of them or not. The tempo of that Aria, in hushed pianissimos, is slow enough to make you check if the Capriccio release isn’t a 2CD set, after all. But no… 56 minutes and Tzimon Barto is done with it; repeats are for suckers.

Actually, I would have liked to hear what he does with repeats, assuming he’d have gone all kinds of different places with them… repeats should never sound the same, after all. No time for wistful thoughts, though: Barto crashes right into the first Variation with such vigor, you’d think he’s checking the instrument for sawdust. And so he goes on, following his nose for beauty and effect, arriving, for example, at Variation 28 where he depicts a music-box, steadily tinkling away in Debussy-esque colors until it slows down on the last notes, coming to a halting stop and then leads right into the steroid-induced brawn of Variation No.29: Part Bach, part Colonel John Matrix from Commando.

Perhaps most telling about the album: It gets better with every listening and doesn’t outstay its welcome. That compared starkly to another recent recording of the Goldberg Variations (by a well-regarded up-and-coming pianist with a consumer-friendly life-story) which were very impressive on first listening and then ground down to banality after repeat exposure. | Charles’ review of this album can be read here.

# 3 – Reissue

Igor Stravinsky, The Complete Columbia Album Collection, Igor Stravinsky (conductor) / Various artists and orchestras, Sony Classical

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Ionarts-at-Large: (Pretty, Boring) Thank God for Dogs!

Jerome Robbins’ Goldberg Variations is a snoozer of interminable prettiness. Jiří Kylián’s Gods and Dogs is a visual and acoustic treat; as spectacular as modern ballet gets.

Dance is as old as rhythm, and rhythm is older than man. It started when a particularly musical chimp first went to work on a hollow tree trunk and churned out trendy beats in accompaniment to his (pri-)mates’ elastic gyrations and approving hoots. That’s not literally what Arcadi, Robert, Boesche, and Buttress claim in PRIMATES, 39(4), October 1998, but the gist is about right. Soon the ground rules were established: excitement = fast. Solemnity = slow. The steps have since changed, but the essence remains the same.

During the early Renaissance dance went from unregulated, convulsive free-for-all into an art-form. Eventually distinct rhythmic patterns and rhythms found their way into music that was not intended to be danced to. Via the French Keyboard Suite, the principal form of stylized dance in baroque music, German composers adapted dance movements in the French and Italian style. What started with Johann Jakob Froberger cumulated in Bach and his Suites and Partitas.

If dance, turned into abstraction, became music through Bach and his colleagues, the process is now working in reverse: the music of Bach is becoming the impetus for modern dance. The music that was once formed by motion, now gives motion. The earliest dance/ballet to the music of Bach I could find preserved on film—thanks be to YouTube!—is Doris Humphrey’s 1928 Air for the G String [sic]. With Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco (1941), set to the Concerto in d-minor for Two Violins, BWV 1043, the Bach-dancing renaissance really got under way. Countless others have followed: The all-male drag group Les Ballet Trockadero with the costume-laden spoof Go for Barocco. William Forsythe’s meta-ballet Artifact—half speech-theater, half Kraftwerk aesthetic. Rodrigo Pederneiras and his Grupo Corpo created Bach, a mix of Las Fura del baus, National Aerobics Championship video, and Wendy Carlos. Nacho Duato’ s 1999 Multiplicity / Forms of Silence and Emptiness is perhaps the epitome of the genre: pure genius and heart-wrenching entertainment. (Video from the Bavarian State Ballet here.)

The Goldberg Variations alone have attracted dozens of choreographers: Marie Chouinard with her darkly mechanical-sexual Body Remix – Goldberg Variations. Susan Jaffe’s classical duet Royenne. Eponymous improvised solo and duo efforts by Mark Haim, Steve Paxton, and a very lyrical choreography by Gregory Dawson. Plots are either absent or superimposed; it is as if the element of abstraction of the music carried over the choreographies. The same is true for the most famous ‘Goldberg Variations Ballet’, Jerome Robbins’ which premiered with the New York City Ballet in 1971. Now the Bavarian State Ballet has taken up Robbins’ Goldberg Variations and coupled them with Jiří Kylián’s Gods and Dogs.

For half the opening Aria, performed by pianist Elena Mednik in the raised orchestra pit, the black curtain is down. When it rises on a clean and wide, off-white stage – empty but for two elaborately costumed dancers, the visual effect elicits “Aaaah’s” from the capacity crowd. Martina Balabanova and Christian Assis present stylized formal dance of courtly France, further stylized into neo-classical ballet steps – somehow reminiscent of figure skating. What follows are variations of dancers, groups and couples, wearing simplest costumes in a colorful array of pastels and tans. The costumes, very slowly, become progressively more elaborate and opulent, until 80 very long minutes later, the Quodlibet’s penultimate number is a ring-a-ring-o' roses in full regalia. Very, very pretty, indeed.

Around the 1970s, the idea that Bach’s Goldberg Variations were meant as a cure for insomnia was still popular: Perhaps Robbins’ work tries to pick up on that. Apart from a few notable moments – a hint of silent movie, a burst of energy amid complacency, folk-dance episodes – there is very little going on, accompanied by a drab, but cruelly repeat-observing performance that made me wish more than once that the music came from a CD, instead. (Perhaps Evgeni Koroliov’s recording on Hänssler, which also observes the repeats but establishes irresistible forward momentum in the variations.) With so much stately harmless hopping about, and figures that looked like a belabored circus act of contortionists, it’s no surprise that Robbins’ work has a strong somniferous effect. It’s too long by half, if not three quarters. Overheard from an elderly couple just behind me: “Very nice, and such adorable costumes. But the music was so awfully monotonous… all that soporific tinkling.” Unfortunately they weren’t Bach-ignorant, they were right on the money.

With some trepidation I made it back for Gods and Dogs, a modern work that goes to Ludwig van Beethoven – namely String Quartet op.18 / 1 – for its musical inspiration. The effect after sitting through Goldberg Variations is much that of receiving a reward: Unspeakable beauty by way of an aesthetic that is aggressive, abrupt, abstract, and anguished. Cinematic lighting, elastic bodies with ghastly-robotic, smooth and spellbinding movements, an endlessly fascinating back curtain of metal chains, strong shadows, and a continuous, however nonfigurative, narrative all captivate the audience. Dirk Haubrich bends Beethoven’s first string quartet into shape, projecting and modifying dark industrial sounds into it that would have you grip your armrests, if the newly upholstered seats of the National Theater had any. Then, suddenly, unexpected and brilliantly, the work ends within minutes of its climax, a quality impossible to overrate.

The only overt clue as to the title of the work was a projected slow-motion wolf that runs ominously toward the viewer. Elsewhere the ballet looks less like “Gods” than advanced Capoeira. True to its name in one other way: It is divine!

Pictures courtesy Bavarian State Ballet, © Wilfried Hösl

Samuel Post Back at Levine School

Bach, Goldberg Variations, G. Gould (DVD, 1981)

As we all know, classical music is dead. Young musicians, however, continue to forge ahead, in the "DIY spirit," as Anne Midgette has put it recently. One of the more successful music students from Washington's own Levine School of Music, Samuel Post, returned to the school for a special concert a couple days before Christmas. He was performing the long work that had been the focus of part of his Master's studies at Northwestern University, Bach's Goldberg Variations. Post had studied the work in great detail, as he demonstrated by introducing his performance with an explanation of the structure of the work, its many complexities of counterpoint and stylistic variation. And, thank goodness that he did, too, since I got lost on the way to the Levine School and heard only the end of his lecture but, fortunately, the entire performance.

The work is so often played and recorded, and we have written about it so extensively, that it probably goes without saying that Post's interpretation does not yet merit a place in the pantheon (not something even to be expected at this point in the young man's life), but he gave an intelligent, well-considered, and above all musically satisfying performance of this extremely complex work. This was true, above all, of the 25th variation, the G minor "black pearl" of the set (as Wanda Landowska once called it), where it is easy to get bogged down in chromatic vagaries. Post's analysis of the score came through in many surprising voicings, as he traced out unexpected interior voices in many movements, as well as stylistically sensitive renderings of dance rhythms and embedded forms (a flashy, attention-getting French ouverture, a raucous quodlibet almost like a medieval charivari), and he handled the finger-tangling hand-crossings with ease. (Bach had a two-manual harpsichord in mind when he composed the work -- Post has written about his approach to the "cheating" required for these movements on his entertaining blog, Sam's Posts.) Most pleasingly, Post added pretty and diverting embellishments to many movements, although he did not take all of the repeats (and those he did take were not in any discernible pattern). There were a few memory slips, the worst in the penultimate variation, but all were nicely recovered with little to draw attention in the correction.

I did not really care for the glacial tempo at which he took the aria, although it was still poetic -- as I suspected while listening to both performances of the aria, Post later stated that he most admired Glenn Gould's second recording -- the slightly different performance in the video version that was released, rather than the audio version, in which Gould's performance of the aria almost comes to a standstill. Post also performed an intriguing encore, his own jazz-inspired and harmonically rather wild arrangement of the Christmas carol Silent Night. Musical creativity is the hallmark of Post's teacher at the Levine School, Irena Orlov, whose remarkable life and teaching style are described in a film called Reaching Beyond, which also documents some of Post's achievements as a youth. (Irena, whom I admire greatly, invited me to the concert, making this post more of an appreciation than a true review.) Those curious to listen for themselves can watch the video embedded below, of his recital of the same work, at Northwestern University's Lutkin Hall (December 4, 2010).

Bach's Silence and Emptiness

As part of an ongoing U.S. tour, the Compañía Nacional de Danza brought its production of Bach: Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness to the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater last night. As previewed by Jens Laurson earlier this week (for WETA), controversial choreographer Nacho Duato drew his inspiration for the work from the life and music of Johann Sebastian Bach. The source is represented in the performance by the soundtrack of music, replayed from carefully chosen recordings. As experienced at last night's performance, it is one of the most visually and musically gorgeous modern dance pieces to come to the Kennedy Center in years. Duato has announced that he will retire from the CND this summer, so this tour is also the end of an era. If you can find a ticket for tonight's performance, take it.

In an audience discussion after Friday's performance, Duato said that he spent two years closely listening to Bach's music, and it shows. The recorded selections are all beautiful choices -- some more austere, others more viscerally joyous -- and the choreography was clearly thought out in conjunction with it, illuminating the music but also not detracting from it. Some of the gestures are derived from musical ones: the playing of the keyboard or other instruments (including the dance pictured here, in which Bach plays another dancer like a cello to the sound of one of the cello suites), jiggles or shakes inspired by embellishments, closely timed repetitions corresponding to polyphonic imitation. Rarely has the rhythmic vivacity of Baroque music been so adroitly captured in visual terms as in the Aeolus movement, set to the opening movement of the cantata Der zufriedengestellte Aolous, with the full cast arranged like the players of a chamber orchestra, pulsating to Bach's direction. Nor has a complex formal structure like the ten interwoven lines (three violins, three violas, three cellos, plus continuo) of the third Brandenburg concerto been elucidated so clearly as in the coordinated movements of the ten dancers of the Brandenburgo movement.

Duato conceived the ballet, a diptych of two related but often contrasting choreographies, for the city of Weimar in 1999, when it was the European Capital of Culture. Duato said afterward that city officials had first suggested the life and work of Goethe as a topic, which did not strike him as quite working with dance, and he quickly settled on Bach, who lived and worked in Weimar from 1708 to 1717. Sets by Jaffar Chalabi, mostly a stark wall of scaffolding that ascends into nothingness, evoke the curvilinear folds of Baroque architecture, and playful costumes (by Duato and Ismael Aznar), over basic black underclothes, recall 18th-century dress and even long priestly cassocks in one unforgettable number.

Other Articles: Lisa Traiger, Spain's national dance company performs an homage to Bach at Kennedy Center (Washington Post, May 14) Laura Bleiberg, Compania Nacional de Danza at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (Los Angeles Times, May 7) Allan Ulrich, Compañía Nacional de Danza (San Francisco Chronicle, May 1)

The work's subject, in a sense, is the struggle between silence and music, or death and life. A bewigged central dancer, Thomas Klein as Bach, opens the work with Duato, who seemed to represent the sound of Bach's music, to the accompaniment of the Aria of the Goldberg Variations. Bach propels and turns the other dancers incarnating his music, refining and altering each performance and, seemingly through it, the final shape of each musical piece. It is a beautiful metaphor for composition, the musical work as a living thing, at times submissive, at others unpredictable and with its own mind. The first half (Multiplicity) makes reference to the composer's happy family life in Weimar, a position he took shortly after his first marriage, to Maria Barbara Bach, and the birth of the first of many children, including two of his most musically successful sons, W. F. Bach and C. P. E. Bach. In the second (Forms of Silence and Emptiness), a serpentine female dancer (Inês Pereira) returns first to silence Bach and then, after a reprise of the Goldberg Aria dance, leads the figure of music into silence.

This performance will be repeated only once more, this evening (May 15, 8 pm) in the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. The troupe then travels for two more performances, a selection of new works presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, before returning to Spain.

The Music of Nacho Duato's "Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness"

Among the recommended concerts in the “May in Music” calendar was this item: The Compañía Nacional de Danza presents “Multiplicity: Bach” at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater on Friday and Saturday May 14th and 15th at 8PM: A “choreographic reflection inspired by the music and life of Johann Sebastian Bach.” Now that I’ve seen it, the recommendation is redoubled. “Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness” (to give the full title of the two-partite work) is absolutely, terrifically right. [Preview on WETA here.]

Since Nacho Duato uses recordings to which he sets the ballet sequences, my record collector's hunting-instinct was kindled and I wanted to know which interpretations exactly he was using. Some were obvious--like the opening and closing Aria from Glenn Gould's 1981 Goldberg Variations (drawn out + humming) others were more tricky to figure out, despite a track list provided in the program of the Bavarian State Opera. Not all of them are still in print; where possible I've given links to the editions that are currently available.

For technical reasons, this post had to be split apart. Follow the link to: Part 2.

Prologue & Epilogue "ARIA" Aria from Goldberg Variations Glenn Gould (1981)	Sony .com .co.uk .de .fr
Multiplicity. No.1 "AEOLUS" "Zerreisset, zersprenget, zertrümmert die Gruft" opening chorus from "Aeolus Propitiated", BWV 205 Harnoncourt / CMW	Teldec .com .co.uk .de .fr
Multiplicity. No.2 "PRELUDE" Prelude from Cello Suite No.1, BWV 1007 Anner Bylsma	Sony .com .co.uk .de .fr
Multiplicity. No.3 & 5 "PER MOTUM CONTRARIUM", "VIOLINI IN UNISONO" from A Musical Offering Davitt Moroney et al.	Harmonia Mundi .com .co.uk .de .fr
Multiplicity. No.4 "POLONAISE" Polonaise from Orchestral Suite No.2, BWV 1067 Kuijken / LPB	Deutsche Harmonia Mundi .com .co.uk .de .fr