The Goldberg Variations Made NewMove over Glenn Gould, here's Simone Dinnerstein.
Posted Monday, Aug. 27, 2007, at 3:54 PM ET
The year was 1955. Three things happened: Albert Einstein died, and Glenn Gould recorded the Goldberg Variations.
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StumbleUponIt is difficult to describe the impact of the second event, in part because I was a fetus at the time. (The third event, of course, was my birth.) But I will try. For those of us—beatniks, philistines, fetuses—who thought of classical music as something powdered and periwigged, that slab of vinyl struck with the force of a meteor. The stegosaurs who played Bach as if he were Lawrence Welk sniffed the heady, pomade-purged air and keeled, metaphorically, over. The Cretaceous Age of Music had ended. The Age of Gould had begun.
We hear a lot about meteoric careers, but Gould's—his concert career—really was. In 1964, at the height and breadth of his fame, he renounced the stage to devote himself to making records. Two years later he set forth the method to his madness in an essay in High Fidelity titled "The Prospects of Recording." In prose of a puckish fustiness as distinctive as his playing, he made three predictions: One: that recording would supplant live performance. Two: that much of the real action, musically speaking, would take place in the studio. Three: that, as technologies of sound manipulation got better and cheaper, the line between artist and audience would be smudged and maybe even—in a distant, Gouldtopian future—erased.
At last count Gould is two for three, which beats the hell out of Nostradamus, Ezekiel, and St. John the Divine, despite their far greater fudge factors and grace periods. Sampling, mashups, remixes, the laptop studio; the recognition, at long last, of the art I've called "phonography"—prophecies Two and Three have come true in spades, most strikingly in the realm of popular music (about which Gould had relatively little to say). Prophecy One, though, looks dead wrong.
Over the past eight years, concert ticket sales have doubled. For the average musician, recording has never replaced live performance as a way of paying the rent, and in the post-Napster age—unless you're a superstar or a studio regular—making a living from records is harder than ever.
All of this goes double for a classical player. Even if a young pianist can get people to consider paying for her recording of the Goldbergs, as opposed to downloading it from a P2P network or burning it from a friend's copy, she has to compete with several hundred versions listed on Amazon, including 28 editions of Gould's four recordings—to say nothing (or very little) of Gould's ghost recreating his '55 version on a computer-assisted Yamaha Disklavier.
I'm as tough a sell as any. Perhaps because of my impressionable age at the time of its release, I seem to have imprinted on Gould's '55 disk. Nothing—not Murray Periaha's refinement, not Maria Tipo's grace, not even Gould's more spacious 1981 revision, the eerie capstone and aria da capo to his career—could shake my allegiance. Until, that is, last fall.
That was when I turned on my radio and heard 
Variation 13 played in a way I'd never heard it played before: pensively, wistfully, with an ebb and flow as natural as breathing. (For comparison, here is No. 13 in Gould's '55 reading.) I did not, as they say, touch that dial until I had heard the last 17 variations, the return of the Sarabande on which all 30 are based, and an interview with the pianist, a 34-year-old Brooklyn native named Simone Dinnerstein.
Remember the name: You'll be hearing it often, usually mispronounced. (She says her last name with a steen, Brooklyn-style, and her first name with a supernumerary uh, Berlin style; if you have a problem with this, take it up with her father, painter and Brooklyn cultural fixture Simon Dinnerstein.)
She'd made the recording in March of 2005, on her own initiative, with friends helping to defray the $15,000 tab. It had done wonders for her career: won her a contract with a major management company, solo gigs with major orchestras, recitals at major halls in New York, London, and Paris. Yet—in a most un-Gouldian twist—it had yet to be picked up by a record label.
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Remarks from the Fray:
It is too bad that mainstream classical audiences (if that phrase isn't an oxymoron) are still basically unaware of or uninterested in historically informed performance, especially for something like solo keyboard. Of the hundreds of recordings of the Goldberg Variations that Eisenberg mentions are available, a number are harpsichord performances released by specialty/audiophile labels. A few examples include Frisch on Alpha, Vinikour on Delos, and Hantai on Mirare.
Admittedly I'm a HIP purist (you couldn't pay me to listen to Bach -- or Scarlatti, or for that matter Mozart -- on a modern concert grand piano), but I really do believe that hearing this music on the instruments for which it was composed (harpsichord, lautenwerke, clavichord, fortepiano, etc.) can be a revelation for anyone willing to hear this music on its own terms. We are so used to imposing the sonic and musical idioms of the 20th century on early music that this can be difficult at first, but after the initial shock wears off, you'll never go back. Thankfully we live in a time when performers, instruments, recording techniques, record labels, and early music societies make historically informed performances of superior quality both accessible to everyone and worth accessing even to non-purists.
--Axon
(To reply, click here.)
Judging from the snippet embedded in the article, she is nowhere near Glen Gould. There are many interesting interpretations of Bach, and everyone is entitled to an opinion, but any valid interpretation must at least play the left hand audibly. In Bach, most of the tension is found in the interplay between the inner and outer voices. Gould was a master at using those voices to heighten the melodic drama. Gould also had an innate feel for Bach's melodic lines that charged them with an almost electric energy. Simone is competent at best. Despite his hyperbolic homage to Gould's Goldberg's I don't think the author really gets what made Gould great.
--puhlease
(To reply, click here.)
Personally, I found the 1955 Gould performance jarring on my nerves. It's very sharp-edged; hard to imagine how it fits with Bach's purpose in writing the Variations in the first place.
Not that it's terrible. It's a virtuoso performance, to be sure; athletic and emphatic.
Dinnerstein's new Variations, to judge from the excerpts, is by contrast much gentler with the material. I would go so far as to say that a warm Romantic sensibility is present - which may account for the observations you and the New York Times made about certain passages resembling the works of later composers.
But that Romantic tinge didn't come from a prescient Bach. His music has more in common with mathematics and machine language than with the emotion-laden, religion-inspired music which mostly preceded him, or the humanistic Romantic era music which followed. He was the Copernicus of music, covertly worshiping at the altar of mathematics and science.
Who has it right?
I don't think anyone has it right. Of the two, Gould probably comes closer to the historical Bach, as his phrasing is not pregnant with emotion. But you're right, Gould's performance is a 3-alarm fire, not a lullaby. He missed the target.
But Dinnerstein missed, too. A Bach lullaby is not the same as a lullaby from the Romantic era. It wasn't emotion Bach was striving for, but a kind of auditory mathematical space within which the mind could achieve calm. He was definitely not playing for a baby in his belly. His purpose was more akin to hypnosis than gushing saccharine into our ears.
Thus my opinion is mixed. Dinnerstein's phrasing is a guilty pleasure. It's very pleasant, I think more so than in Gould's justly famous recording. That by itself is an accomplishment of note; anyone who can come away with listeners as happy as Gould's is doing darned good. But it isn't the ultimate Goldberg. That mountain has not been scaled.
--UrgeIt
(To reply, click here.)
(8/30)