Hyperion to Release Latest BWV 988 Recording

courtesy of PIAS

Those that have been following this site regularly may have noticed that Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 988 set of “Goldberg” variations has received a generous amount of attention since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unless I am mistaken, my first encounter with the music under “shelter-in-place conditions” came from pianist Anyssa Neumann, who took a one-day-at-a-time approach to making YouTube videos of each of the variations, after which all of the recordings were compiled into a single YouTube Playlist. My own listening was also guided by two major anthologies of recordings of past pianists, Peter Serkin and Glenn Gould (both of whom released two different recordings of their performances of BWV 988). Lang Lang then did the same thing, releasing an album with recordings of both a studio performance and a recital at the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where Bach worked as Kapellmeister (music director) from 1723 until his death in 1750. Most recently (about a month and a half ago) I found myself listening to an arrangement of BWV 988 for solo harp prepared and performed by Parker Ramsay. Ironically, over all these months, I have yet to write about a performance of this music on an instrument that would have been played during Bach’s lifetime!

The latest release to come my way brings another pianist into the fold. Hyperion has recorded a performance of BWV 988 by Siberian-born pianist Pavel Kolesnikov, now based in London. The album is scheduled for release one week from today; and, as expected, Amazon.com now has a Web page for processing pre-orders. What makes this new release interesting is the set of circumstances behind Kolesnikov’s decision to perform this music. Having created choreography for Bach’s “Brandenburg” concertos, the dancer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker decided that her next project would be BWV 988; and she invited Kolesnikov to work with her.

I do not know very much about De Keersmaeker; but, on the basis of her Wikipedia page, she certainly strikes me as an adventurous choreographer. However, there is no indication of whether, when she decided to embark on her BWV 988 project, she was aware of the choreography that Jerome Robbins had created, which was first performed by the New York City Ballet in May of 1971. I remember seeing that ballet shortly after its opening. Unless I am mistaken, the music was performed by an on-stage pianist. The choreography was not particularly compelling and seemed to lack the “musical awareness” that one could find in George Balanchine’s approach to Bach in his “Concerto Barocco” ballet. Indeed, I wondered if Robbins shared my own sense of fatigue as he worked his way through the last half-dozen variations. After a good night’s sleep, I found myself thinking about the film The Spirit of St. Louis and the fatigue that began to take hold of Charles Lindbergh in that seeming-eternity of time before he finally saw European soil!

Obviously, the new Kolesnikov album does not occupy the listener with how De Keersmaeker managed to fill that same amount of time with her own choreography. However, I was definitely struck by his admission that, prior to De Keersmaeker’s invitation, he had very little knowledge of the music and no experience in trying to play it. As a result, his recording is very much a document of how he found his own way; and his notes for the accompanying booklet state that, in preparing for performance, “I had no choice but to build the piece anew, to the best of my own humble knowledge and understanding.”

That decision suggests a rejection of the possibility of standing on the shoulders of giants; and, on the basis of that metaphor, I came away from this recording feeling that Kolesnikov never managed to see very far into the distance. The good news is that one can appreciate a sense of spontaneity in his approach to each of the variations. The bad news is that, in the absence of any underlying structure to unify the whole experiences, he runs the risk of giving in to the same sort of fatigue that undid Robbins.

Many readers probably know by now that my own “orientation” for any journey through BWV 988 was supplied by pianist András Schiff, who believed that the “journey” through the composition was “guided,” from beginning to end, by the bass line. In that context I would say that Kolesnikov’s attention to the bass line was a “sometime thing.” As a result, one is likely to be more satisfied with “piecemeal” listening, allowing any individual variation to speak for itself, rather than worrying about how it fits into the overall architecture. To be fair, this was probably how the insomniac Count Hermann Karl von Kaiserling listened to the music that Johann Gottlieb Goldberg played for him.

I must confess that current conditions have led to my own bouts with insomnia recently. I tend to deal with them through either my SiriusXM subscription or the Music Choice channels provided by my xfinity subscription. Perhaps on one of those occasions I shall encounter Kolesnikov’s recording and decide whether he has evoked a suitable “Goldberg experience.”