Wigmore Hall
Goldberg
Variations, BWV 988
Mahan Esfahani (harpsichord)
What could be more capable of lightening our darkness on the longest night of the darkest year most of us have
ever known, perhaps even of defending us from some of its perils and dangers, than
the music of Johann Sebastian Bach? Mahan Esfahani’s searching exploration of the
fathomless Goldberg Variations – one of
the few Bach keyboard works of which I stood so much in awe and trepidation that
I never dared touch, let alone learn it – certainly did a great deal to offer
solace and nourishment, intellectual and spiritual.
The Aria, flexible, though
never for the sake of mere flexibility, imparted a fine sense of a storyteller,
a narrator: ‘Once upon a time’, or ‘Es war einmal’. Already, by the second variation,
we heard the truth of Bach’s plan as outlined by Esfahani in his excellent
programme note, by turns scholarly and winningly speculative. The first of ten
groups of variations – genre-piece, virtuous piece, canon – was clearly upon
us, even if we had not yet heard that first canon at the unison. One of the
many strengths of the performance was that that truth related equally to the
work and to its interpretation: not in a bald, formalistic sense, but so as to
liberate the musical imagination. Indeed, the Canone all’Unisono might have been subtitled ‘The Joy of Canon’; for
no one, not even Haydn, does joy better than Bach. (Just think, if you doubt me,
of the opening of the Gloria and Sanctus to the Mass in B minor.)
As the variations unfolded, we
heard lines intertwine, as if they were solo singers in a cantata, or a pair of
oboes or other obbligato instruments. Such connection occasionally had me
speculate about ‘meaning’, but not for too long, lest I miss the ‘purely’
musical drama. Formal, rather than expressive kinship, with Scarlatti’s
keyboard music came to mind too. More than once, I thought of the earlier,
apparently less complex world – relatively speaking – of the Brandenburg Concertos, and indeed of the
later world of Max Reger’s transcriptions of those works. Sometimes, especially
at moments like those, I could have sworn I heard a third hand; I did not see
it though.
Dance rhythms enabled
connections, then: across and beyond the keyboard repertoire. They played an
equally important role structurally, delineating the narrative – and narrative
was very much a strength here, I think – of the performance. So too, though,
did the canonical writing. The Canone
alla quarta spoke with a perfection worthy of Mozart, or perhaps better,
suggested why Bach’s music, although not necessarily this very work, proved so
transformative for the later composer.
And those harmonies! This is
not ‘just’ counterpoint, as if the opposition ever made any sense whatsoever in
Bach, or indeed in most great music… Mozart would surely have relished, just as
Esfahani did, the turns to the minor mode, to his special key of G minor, and the
chromaticism unleashed. The ‘black pearl’, as we shall always know it,
post-Landowska, seemed to renew its mysteries before us. Registration, tempo,
rubato, no one component, nor indeed their combination, seemed quite enough,
splendidly navigated though all those interpretative challenges were, to
explain the alchemy not only heard but experienced. (We must, as the soloist
told us, be active, not passive, as listeners, just as we must be active to
transform the world around us.) A labyrinthine Bach who looked to Berg, a ‘Bach
The Progressive’ in an almost Schoenbergian sense, a ‘Bach The Subjective’ in
an Adornian yet not-Adornian sense: all those and more recomposed the work
before our ears. This heightened, ‘special’ quality was not only apt but
necessary.
Relief thereafter ran through Esfahani’s
fingers – and our hearing of them. Yet soon, a quality of proliferation, reminding
me how much Boulez revered Bach, took on its own, not always relieving life.
There was an almost Brahmsian satisfaction to the ‘Quodlibet’; its good nature
suggested a different musical future, that of Haydn’s sonata forms, which might
initially seem to have eclipsed Bach’s music, but not for long. The return of the
Aria, though, was, quite rightly, both return and nothing of the sort. It
framed, like the return of our tale to the world of the storyteller himself; it
was the same, and yet different. There was here, in Bach’s music, I think, both
a glint and a tear in the eye. ‘Die Zeit,’ as a distinguished lady once
said in not entirely dissimilar mood, ‘die ist ein sonderbar Ding.’
