San Francisco Classical Voice

Pianist Murray Perahia's performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations on Sunday afternoon at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium in the Lively Arts series was a brilliant tour de force, an exhilarating and exhausting experience for artist and audience alike. The program, which opened with four Choral Preludes by Bach, arranged and sometimes transformed by Ferruccio Busoni, was played without intermission.

The Choral Preludes, expertly introduced in program notes by Larry Yeaw, signaled their performance direction. The smooth melodic lines of "Wachet auf" (BWV 645) were contrasted with the exuberant, breathtaking perpetual motion of "Nun freut euch" (BWV 734). But these two, as well as "Nun komm der Heiden Heiland" and "Ich ruf' zu dir," were just appetizer to the main course — the Goldberg Variations.

Composed for a two-keyboard harpsichord, the Goldberg Variations is an awesome monument in the realm of keyboard music. Each of the ten sets of three variations ends with a canon, the 30 variations sandwiched between an aria that begins the work and also ends it. The variations, on a relatively simple series of chords and often increasingly complicated, are composed in most of the musical styles of Bach's day.

The final product includes all the extremes of tempo, dynamics, and emotions and everything in between. It is the ultimate in sophisticated art by the bewigged Baroque master, something that has frightened off most performers and audiences over time. Yet when played with Perahia's insight, sensitivity, and technical prowess, it comes across as a celebration of the joy, tragedy, drama, and beauty of music and of life.

Though he has practiced the variations on the harpsichord, Perahia performs them on the piano because he says that instrument better conveys the architecture of the work while sidestepping the work's reputation as an academic exercise. In this he follows in the tradition of Glenn Gould, who overwhelmed many of us 45 years ago with his revolutionary and brilliant — but much abbreviated — piano recording of the Variations.

After the soft and stately opening aria, Perahia's conception of the music emerged. Since Bach did not give many performance guidelines — tempos, dynamics, or the like — each artist is guided by his own artistic integrity and knowledge of performance practice. Perahia's interpretation emphasized the constant contrasts and tensions within and between movements and, through the use of crescendos, rubatos, and other expressive devices, his emotional response to them. As with Gould, there was nothing of the "stuffy" Bach here.

Perahia was relaxed and in total artistic and technical command at the piano. There were quick frolics, as in Vars. 5, 17, and 26, the last with its rapidly ascending passages in the left hand as the right takes the variation. Pouncing staccatos in the bass line of Var. 8 were matched by the precise fugues of Var. 10 and the end of Var. 16, the latter, a French Overture that begins the second half of the entire work, with its opening flourishes.

In Var. 23 the soloist's hands crossed constantly to handle the variation and embellishments originally composed for a double-manual harpsichord. Perahia played the delicate, darkly chromatic Var. 25, by far the longest of the variations at more than seven minutes, so as to evoke what he calls the "deadly atmosphere" of the crucifixion. The often deliberately lumbering Var. 29 was followed by Var. 30, the last before the quiet reprise of the opening aria.

Having admired but declined to perform Bach for decades, Perahia has described the Goldberg Variations as "one of the most challenging experiences a pianist can face." In recent years, he has taken him up and released recordings of several works, including the Goldberg Variations this year, on the 250th anniversary of Bach's death. The Stanford performance was the first of many scheduled for U.S. and European cities next month.

(William Ratliff, a Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University, is a former music critic of The Peninsula Times Tribune and a stringer for The Los Angeles Times and Opera News.)

©2000 William Ratliff, all rights reserved