Bach - Goldberg Variations [Perahia]Murray Perahia is an American, born in 1947 [now 63 years old], he lives in London, the front cover booklet shot is lovely [photo by Ken Schles, must have been the same session as his Schubert disc photo's], nice shadows, lovely light coming in through the windows.
On this listen i'm amazed at the sheer variety that Bach throws at us, there's dazzling virtuosity side by side with the slower but more lyrical side of things, i was greatly impressed with variations 5, 8, 14, 20 & 29-30, and i suppose the two middle variations of these six [14 & 20] were especially enlightening, both of these variations require cross-hands, and it's great to watch a Pianist scale these difficulties on YouTube below.
Variation 14 starts with a bass 'buzz' [0:00 & repeated at 0:30], i love this!, what a great idea, and Perahia makes the most of this, and an exciting treble trill [0:00-0:02], there's some gorgeous trills that go down the keyboard in succession [0:15-0:23], repeated again and again [0:46+, 1:17+ & 1:48+], the variation is repeated twice, and then in the second half it's repeated twice again, but slightly differently, it's a tremendous fast and complex variation that Glenn Gould called 'giddy', i love the way that Perahia plays this.
Variation 20, i can only say wow! after hearing Perahia play this, he must have a third hand!, it's very much in the same vein as Variation 14, this one is a fast staccato [0:00-0:13], again ornamented with trills up and down the keyboard [0:13+ & 0:40+], in the second half there's what i will call 'controlled garble' [1:08+ & 1:35+], a truly outstanding mess of notes that congeal into order, it is breathtaking.
Here's Variation 14 and Variation 20 on YouTube.
