San Francisco Classical Voice

The opening Aria also revealed something more elusive about Schiff's personal sound. His capacity to produce a seamless, singing tone arose not only from a simple finger-produced legato, but also from a weighted tenuto type of attack that often produced the impression of a legato. In fact, Schiff frequently was not very conscientious over matters of articulation. By smoothing over the gigue-like snap of Variation 7, for example, he sapped it of its vitality, and Variation 16 could have used more “air” to clarify the over-dotted rhythm of its French overture. Nevertheless, Schiff never allowed the velvety thickness of his sound to become cloying or syrupy — his delivery was far too direct for that.

Which is not to say that Schiff lacks subtlety. A few of his interpretive decisions swept away the cobwebs of a more traditional reading. Instead of adopting the assertive tone typically employed with the alla breve fughettas in Variations 10 and 22, Schiff preferred a more tender approach, a gentle placement of strand upon contrapuntal strand. And even when he indulged in a bit of aggressive pounding, it was always for a larger purpose, serving as a foil for the milder tone of the previous variation, or to offset a gentle repeat of the same material.

This type of musical intelligence — the capacity to construct musical structures and balances — extended even to Schiff's use of silence. Most pianists don't obey all of Bach's fermatas between variations, and Schiff was no exception. (This probably is a good thing: there are too many of these pauses, and they would unavoidably work against any large-scale forward momentum.) What was exceptional was his insertion of three grand pauses (as much as eight seconds long) after Variations 10, 15 and 22. This gave the audience the welcome impression that the variations appear in four large movements (somewhat analogous to the tripartite division of Rachmaninov's “Paganini” Rhapsody) rather than as a bewilderingly long chain of individual character pieces.

Schiff's playing also worked on a gutsier level. The most obvious example of this was his tendency, in the more technically challenging variations, to actually accelerate through the most difficult passagework. At first hearing, the velocity of some of densest moments (as in Variations 5 and 8) was so hair-raising that collapse seemed inevitable. Yet Schiff repeatedly averted disaster. It gradually became apparent that this was just one of the ways he chose to project the growing harmonic tension generated by Bach's multiple sequences, which impel the music towards the middle and final cadence of each variation.

I must confess that I had some reservations with the unflappable suavity of Schiff's tonal production. This was clearest with the earlier canons (Variations 3, 6, 9 and 12), which all suffered from a lack of differentiation between the canonic voices. Admittedly, separating out the closely knitted strands of a canon at the unison or at the second may be too much like picking at the Gordian knot. Nevertheless, a more articulate performance — complete with accents, delayed downbeats, staccatos — might at least have brought the individual lines into greater relief.

But to quibble further would be to lose sight of Schiff's incontestable brilliance, one that rests on a forthright, musical honesty that requires no special effects. Most important was the fact that Schiff actually delights in this music, charging at each technical obstacle with aplomb and gusto. And, as his public well knows, that kind of delight is highly contagious.