BaL 18.02.12 - Bach Goldberg Variations

[vinteuil]

I've merged it with the "real" BaL thread (buried very deep indeed!)

... many thanks for grafting the new stem on to the earlier thread - it's been most entertaining and instructive going back and reading what we all wrote all those years ago.

[Nick Armstrong]

... many thanks for grafting the new stem on to the earlier thread - it's been most entertaining and instructive going back and reading what we all wrote all those years ago.

Me too [Gould 1981 / Rousset] but I would not be without my third version with Perahia .

Same here! Sitting in the front row @RFH when he played it live was one of the indelible musical experiences of my life.

And I need Denk too

[Nick Armstrong]

I have to say that the Esfahani aria is very peculiar. The melodic line sounds all out of goose to me.

So you're not saying it's a turkey then?

[Thropplenoggin]

So you're not saying it's a turkey then?

[kernelbogey]

...I have to say that the Esfahani aria is very peculiar - I'm not sure why it sounds so different. The melodic line sounds all out of goose to me. Perhaps one of the resident scholars can enlighten me....

Throps, I'd still appreciate your explaning this term. The nearest I could get from the Urban Dictionary describes a manoeuvre which it would be diifficult to perform with both hands on the keyboard.

[Thropplenoggin]

Throps, I'd still appreciate your explaning this term. The nearest I could get from the Urban Dictionary describes a manoeuvre which it would be diifficult to perform with both hands on the keyboard.

It is an expression derived from the great satirist Chris Morris, who in a spoof newsreport on Brass Eye describes someone's trajectory going awry as 'all out of goose'. I find the melodic trajectory of Esfahani's aria similarly orf.

Listen hear: http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/gb/cat/4795929

Amiright???

An Amazon reviewer describes is thus:

My problems begin with the first note. I say "note" because although the score demands two notes played simultaneously, Esfahani separates them, with the bass sounding just before the top G. He uses this effect a lot throughout the Aria (and in several of the Variations) and I'm afraid I find it a distracting affectation which breaks up the flow of the music and gives it a halting, limping feel. And although that specific effect is absent in Variation 4, it, too, has a lack of rhythmic continuity which I find very distracting…and then Variation 5 comes along with the most delightful sense of lightness and flow, making it one of the loveliest interpretations I've heard.

[kernelbogey]

Throps, thanks for the elucidation. (I don't know Chris Morris or Brass Eye.)

I listened to the tiny fraction of the aria which the DG website permits and simply found it interesting. Of course living with this interpretation, and my favourites Hewitt and Gould too, I might find it irritating.

I wonder what others think of his 'affectation'.

[Bryn]

I don't hear it as an affectation, but as an attempt to draw close to 17th Century performance practice, as understood by some currently active musicologists, IIRC.

[Nick Armstrong]

Interesting (perhaps) that no one has yet mentioned the 2016 Gramophone 'Record of the Year' performance by Igor Levit.... which I haven't heard.

Doesn't seem to have swept the board here, at any rate

[Bryn]

Interesting (perhaps) that no one has yet mentioned the 2016 Gramophone 'Record of the Year' performance by Igor Levit.... which I haven't heard.

Doesn't seem to have swept the board here, at any rate

Got it's own thread, innit?

[vinteuil]

Interesting (perhaps) that no one has yet mentioned the 2016 Gramophone 'Record of the Year' performance by Igor Levit.... which I haven't heard.

Doesn't seem to have swept the board here, at any rate

#186 supra.

[Richard Tarleton]

... on harpsichord I would not want to be without -

Gustav Leonhardt
Kenneth Gilbert
Christophe Rousset
Andreas Staier
Scott Ross
Pierre Hantai

A quick sample on You Tube....Steier seems to do that thing with the first note which annoys Throps....Scott Ross doesn't, but adopts a curiously (to my ear) jaunty tone with the opening of the aria which I haven't come across before....

The Rousset, at an eye-watering price, is the subject of the most bizarre review I've ever read on Amazon. (Not its fault)

I do like the sound of the Gilbert - I recently bought his Rameau 2-CD on Archiv which I'm greatly enjoying. Perhaps I should go for that (I want a great, and uncontroversial, harpsichord version to add to my existing one by the bloke from Red Priest ). Gilbert or Leonhardt?

[underthecountertenor]

Herbert von Karajan is booked on next week's Record Review to voice his opinion of this disc.

[vinteuil]

The Rousset, at an eye-watering price...

... £3-84 + p&p if you can cope with second-hand

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000004CYL

[Tony Halstead]

Throps, thanks for the elucidation. (I don't know Chris Morris or Brass Eye.)

I listened to the tiny fraction of the aria which the DG website permits and simply found it interesting. Of course living with this interpretation, and my favourites Hewitt and Gould too, I might find it irritating.

I wonder what others think of his 'affectation'.

I was thinking that 'out of goose' was attempting to draw a parallel with 'goose steps' i.e. a highly exaggerated step that very much draws attention to itself. The left hand's hyper-active fractional anticipation of the right hand tune, in my opinion simply happens too often and is in danger of becoming a predictable mannerism. Unfortunately I have so far had time only to listen to Esfahani's Aria, and was so surprised by it that I then immediately listened to Pinnock, Gilbert, Kirkpatrick, Hantai, Richter, Malcolm, Gary Cooper, Maggie Cole, Anthony Newman and Steven Devine on harpsichords, plus Schiff, Perahia and Tureck (she is amazingly slow @ 6' whereas the average is 4' when the repeats are taken) on piano.

As a general rule the pianists do observe 'both hands together' whereas the harpsichordists display varying degrees of 'non-synchronicity' (apologies if the latter is an invented word, but it just came to mind!). The most synchronised are Kirkpatrick, Malcolm, Richter and Cole. Esfahani is the least synchronised of all.

I can understand and can follow the logic of introducing a tiny little 'preamble' to the down-beat ( only) of each bar and then regarding the next 2 left-hand notes not as a continuing bass line but as harmony notes 'fleshing out' the chords and therefore not needing the left hand's anticipation; but pretty well most of the time Esfahani anticipates every one of the beats. Inidentally, if you want to give yourself a brain teaser, try listening to it from the viewpoint that those bass notes are actually ON the beat, in which case the right hand tune emerges in a quirky, syncopated way. Maybe Bach intended that...?

I really do now need to find my copy of C.P.E. Bach's treatise on keyboard playing to check whether he had anything to say about the 'preluding left hand' practice. If as Bryn suggests, it is/ was part and parcel of 18th century keyboard style. then one can hear an early hinting glimmer of what was later to become an irritating mannerism of 19th-20th century romantic piano style (and can be heard on the various extant recordings of e.g pupils of Clara Schumann). This has been explained and defended by such as Tobias Matthay, York Bowen and other piano pedagogues, ( maybe even Charles Rosen?) in that the lifting of the damper from the bass string by an anticipatory left hand just before the right hand descends on a 'singing' note ( e.g. in much of Chopin, Schumann and Liszt) lends that melodic note, the first note of a tune, greater 'ring' and resonance.

I grew up as a child in the era of 78 records. Over 60 years ago, when having piano lessons, in the early 1950s, from an elderly lady who must have been born in the 1880s, I sometimes found myself rather cheekily playing 'left hand before right', maybe in a Chopin Waltz. She used to pounce on this, saying 'don't you dare do that, it's a very naughty, old-fashioned way of playing, you MUST play both hands together'!