The Goldberg Variations Made NewMove over Glenn Gould, here's Simone Dinnerstein.
Posted Monday, Aug. 27, 2007, at 3:54 PM ET
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StumbleUponLike many budding pianists, Dinnerstein idolized Gould. Yet her Goldbergs are—in every particular but quality—poles apart from his. This may have something to do with the circumstances under which they evolved. In his notes to the 1955 recording, Gould says the Sarabande's bass line is "pregnant with promise." So was Dinnerstein, when she learned the piece. In her case the promise was a son, Adrian, now 5 years old.
If she labored, so to speak, under a mechanical disadvantage (by the third trimester, Adrian was crowding her a bit during those daunting cross-hand passages), the metaphorical advantage was huge. In his brilliantly overwritten novel The Gold Bug Variations, Richard Powers marvels at the generation of nearly infinite variety from a bass line just 32 bars long. For him, it mirrors the spinning of what feels like (or used to) the infinite variety of life on Earth from the four bases of DNA—or, for that matter, the generation of a single organism, such as a human boy.
Another thing: One feels that Dinnerstein was, from the start, playing for someone—unlike Gould, who played for himself and maybe, if he was in a sociable mood, Bach. Gould was one of the first classical musicians to master the mode of phonography I've called "cool": Rather than reach out to the listener, he lets the listener come to him. Dinnerstein's performance is anything but cool; it glows with a warmth that I will, with difficulty, restrain myself from calling maternal. Yet it has its own profound inwardness. Dinnerstein sheds some light on this: "When you're pregnant, you're aware of having somebody else there, but it's also very much you. In a way, the most playing for yourself you could possibly do is playing with a baby inside."
Most people, I suppose, who have heard the Goldbergs have heard the origin story that is packaged with them. Bach wrote them for his pupil Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, musician to Count Keyserlingk. A Balt by birth, a Pole by citizenship, serving as ambassador of the Imperial Court of Russia to the Electoral Court of Saxony, the count naturally had trouble getting to sleep. The variations were so many grains, which Goldberg, his sandman, would sprinkle upon his pillow—each a unique crystal, a dream world unto itself.
Until 1955 the story was plausible enough, on the strength of the few recordings available. Gould's Goldbergs, however, were crystal meth. If I were Keyserlingk and heard them, I'd leap out of bed and draft a treaty. If I heard Dinnerstein's, I'd happily cry myself to sleep. They are an extended fairy tale, a far-flung journey told by firelight, a lullaby.
In the dreamlike fugue state (or maybe canon state) that Dinnerstein induces, Bach seems to be channeling the next 200 years of Western music. Variation 14 has the spikiness of Prokofiev, 17 the mad jiggle of Nancarrow, 
28 the ripple and shimmer of Debussy, 29 the manly rhetoric of middle Beethoven. In Variations 3 and 13, one finds the nursery reverie of Schumann's Kinderszenen; in 19 and 30 (and elsewhere) a glow, a sense of beatitude, that brings to mind Berlioz's Enfance du Christ. (For comparison, here are Gould's versions of 28 and 30.)
For Gould, live performance was a barbarism, a gladiatorial blood sport. For Dinnerstein, it is "almost a religious experience." I went to Dinnerstein's recital last fall at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art (no Goldbergs, but she did play Bach, as well as Schumann, Copland, and Beethoven), and it was a religious experience—not just for the pianist but, I sensed, for a sizeable fraction of those present.
Dinnerstein is a throwback to such high priestesses of music as Wanda Landowska and Myra Hess. (Her teachers have included Peter Serkin and Maria Curcio, a pupil of Artur Schnabel: hierophants all.) Dame Hess is now best remembered for soothing breasts and stiffening lips with her recitals at London's National Gallery during the Blitz. It's not much of a stretch to picture Dinnerstein, too, calmly playing Bach as the Boche pitch the bomb balls in. (Actually, for someone used to practicing with a 5-year-old boy in the house, this would be child's play.) She likes to tell the story of her favorite piano, a 1903 Hamburg Steinway that lived in the town hall of Hull, Yorkshire, during the war. When the hall was wrecked by German bombs, the piano survived with hardly a scratch. After the war, it was used in a series of concerts to bolster Hull's spirit, and in 2002 it played a similar role at the reopening of the World Trade Center's Winter Garden. This is the piano on which she recorded her Goldbergs.
Why do I bother telling you this—any of this—if you can't listen to the record at all? Well, the story has a happy ending, which smudges but hardly erases our un-Gouldian paradox: Telarc has picked up the recording and will release it into the wild tomorrow. What's more, Dinnerstein is touring: She's taking her Goldbergs on the road.
Go hear her, and get religion. And if you can't, there's always the record.
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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
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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)