Wigmore Hall
Goldberg
Variations, BWV 988
Igor Levit (piano)
With this outstanding
performance of the Goldberg Variations,
Igor Levit opened a series of three concerts performing celebrated sets of
piano variations. To come are a pairing of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and Frederic Rzewski’s set on The People United will never be Defeated,
and finally Ronald Stevenson’s Passacaglia
on DSCH.
It struck me from the opening
bars of the Aria that this would be a very different performance from that of
Levit’s Sony recording. This was to be a performance for here and now, the work
rethought and reimagined. Every note of the Aria seemed considered, quite
without pedantry, instead freshly discovered: if not prelapsarian – Bach is too
human for that – then pristine. This reading proved freer, I think, certainly
different, and was very much a reading for the piano, sustained as only this
instrument can. Pianists imitating harpsichordists seem to me as misguided as vice versa; they can and should learn
from each other, but learning is a very different thing from an attempt to
imitate that will always be in vain.
The first variation’s release
of pent-up energy made for an ebullient contrast, variegated within a logical
framework. (Is that not the essence of Bach?) Its two succeeding variations had
a strong sense of succession, the third in particular already integrative of
tendencies within the music we had heard up to the point. A pleasing sturdiness
characterised the fourth, a sturdiness that yet quested – and how, leading to
flawless virtuosity in the fifth: a brilliant moto perpetuo through which, crucially, music was realised.
Harmonic twists told without exaggeration in the sixth, laying the groundwork
for a finely pointed seventh variation that released Bach’s own caprice (as
opposed to being capriciously realised). By the time that we reached the ninth
variation, the third of the canons, a grace that elicited reflection – where we
had been, would be, but also very much what lay beneath the surface – was,
quite rightly, the order of the day. Intimations of a Mendelssohn scherzo in
the eleventh, a twelfth variation that spoke of strong kinship with that sturdy
fourth, and a thirteenth that presented Bach as inspiration for Mozartian
classicism, left-hand voicing that was loved and elicited love, with a spring
in its step: the dizzying conspectus of ways in which we might think of, perceive,
and respond to variations could not have been more immanent. Energy once more
released in the fourteenth invited Levit – invitation graciously accepted – to take
all the time in the world for the fifteenth variation: an invitation, as
Schumann might have put it, to explore new paths, technical and expressive.
And so, the ‘Ouverture’ sounded
very much as such: a fierce, Frenchified exterior heralding just such new
beginnings that were yet old. From the seventeenth variation onwards, there was
very much a sense of new territory broached within that logical framework: for
instance, a twentieth variation whose caprice connected us with the world of
the seventh; a twenty-first that sounded both more archaic and more Romantic;
and a twenty-second that proved beautifully, reassuringly reinventive, an
utterance from the Bach whose well-nigh divine judgement brooks no appeal.
Lisztian display in the twenty-third variation and Mozartian (perhaps
Beethovenian too) response in its successor prepared the way for Wanda
Landowska’s ‘black pearl’, taken slowly, as only a piano can. Composer and
pianist alike offered a personal response of pathos that yet revelled in a labyrinthine
harmonic imagination that looked towards Mozart’s reimagings of Bach and Handel,
even to Berg. This was a slow movement, an Adagio,
in the emphatic sense.
Its successor, the twenty-sixth
variation, might have sounded conventional by comparison – unless and until one
listened. It really grew during its course, too, as did its successor in response; for by now, it was difficult not to
think in Classical developmental terms as well as Bach’s own. The twenty-eight
variation brought, even at this late stage, a true sense of ringing the
changes, not least through Mozartian subtlety in the chromatic melodies of
those crossed-hand lines. Heading towards apparent climax, the twenty-ninth
variation was of course followed, surprisingly and unsurprisingly, by the
rejoicing of the ‘Quodlibet’. It was a moment for taking stock, a time for Bach
the Christian, non-exclusivist, synthetic, to remind us of the fathomless world
of the church cantatas through good-natured, ‘domestic’ humour. (Beethoven
would surely have nodded assent.) At least that was how it spoke to me: to
others, it would doubtless have done differently. With the return to the Aria,
we heard and felt something that was both the same as before and very much not.
It was, rightly, unclear how and why: music, like so much else, is ultimately a
mystery. There is no right and wrong, correct and incorrect: not, at any rate,
in the way Thomas Beecham’s ‘drowsy armchair pedants’ would have it. Bach’s
score had been beautifully, meaningfully brought to life; next time it would be
different.
