If you know Bach’s Goldberg Variations only through the eternally best-selling recordings by Glenn Gould, you have not really heard the work. Gould was a brilliant but idiosyncratic player whose approach to Bach might be compared to Laurence Olivier’s renditions of Shakespeare: the art can obscure the matter. Furthermore, the Goldbergs drastically change character when they are transferred from the harpsichord, for which they were written, to the piano. The equal-tempered tuning of the modern piano is markedly different from tuning systems of the early eighteenth century, and the instrument’s opulent sonorities cast a Romantic blur over Bach’s harmony and counterpoint. To avoid muddying the texture, pianists rely on a clean, detached style, and as a result the music too often sounds subdued, fastidious, even soporific.
This is not to say that presenting Bach on the piano is any sort of categorical mistake. The composer took an interest in new instruments, including the fortepiano, and his music should not be confined to the technologies of his time. When a pianist on the order of Murray Perahia or András Schiff undertakes the Goldbergs, it is hardly an inauthentic experience. Nor does the use of a harpsichord guarantee historical accuracy; no one knows for certain how these pieces should go. Even so, Bach on a harpsichord sounds clearer, brighter, more incisive—curiously, more modern. When Virgil Thomson heard the pioneering harpsichord revivalist Wanda Landowska play the Goldbergs in 1942, he spoke of “pungency and high relief.” The mechanism of the piano bops strings with felt-covered hammers. That of the harpsichord plucks the strings; notes pierce the ear more than they stroke it. Up close, the harpsichord can be a wild, prickly beast.
A new generation of harpsichordists is coming to the fore, one that has given an almost hipsterish profile to an instrument that is popularly stereotyped as archaic and twee. The Iranian-American harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani has started beefs with early-music eminences and adopted such provocative repertory as Steve Reich’s “Piano Phase.” The young French keyboardist Jean Rondeau plays jazz on the side. These performers have room to mature, but their recent concerts and recordings—both with an emphasis on the Goldbergs—suggest that the venerable harpsichord, which Landowska called “the roi-soleil of instruments,” will have a long future.
Every profession needs an enfant terrible. Esfahani, who was born in Tehran in 1984 and grew up in Rockville, Maryland, happily fills the role, casting himself as a fearless renegade in an insular field. Last year, in an interview with the online magazine VAN, he said, “I’ve heard leading figures in the harpsichord world give recitals that were played as if someone had died.” He also said, “Having funky hair or playing a little bit of jazz doesn’t make you iconoclastic if your harpsichord playing is perfectly orthodox”—an apparent reference to Rondeau, who favors unruly hairdos. The celebrated German keyboardist Andreas Staier reprimanded Esfahani, judging Rondeau “the more competent musician.” In the end, the debate was more entertaining than edifying: no one came across as particularly large-minded, except for Rondeau, who said nothing.
On May 1st, Esfahani appeared at Weill Hall, with a program that included Bach’s French Overture and a selection of pieces by Rameau, Frescobaldi, and Jiří Antonín Benda. Esfahani spoke from the stage in his usual garrulous fashion, though this time he avoided passing judgment on colleagues. On the subject of Bach’s suite, he said that its successive presentation of various dance forms and instrumental styles—gavotte, passepied, bourrée, gigue, and so on—might remind listeners of a multinational pageant. Esfahani’s playing is notable for its crisp articulation, headlong momentum, and savvy theatrical effects. He knows how to take a microscopic pause before a climactic chord, making it sound louder and more final. (Crescendos are famously impossible on a conventional harpsichord, because the strings are plucked the same way no matter how hard you strike the keys; good harpsichordists can shape phrases and textures to create the illusion of increasing or decreasing volume.) Esfahani’s vitality is infectious: the crowd responded with whoops and with shouts for encores.
Esfahani seems less at ease in lyrical or gently dancing episodes. He slightly rushed the Sarabande of the Overture, as if he were impatient to get back to the up-tempo bits. The slower Rameau selections—“Les tendres plaintes,” “Les soupirs”—lacked a measure of languid grace. The same reservation applies to his generally fine 2016 recording of the Goldbergs, for the Deutsche Grammophon label. In the twenty-fifth variation—the doleful G-minor episode that Landowska named the Black Pearl—Esfahani nudges the tempo ahead, dispatching the piece in less than seven minutes; by contrast, the American harpsichordist Jory Vinikour, in a superb 2000 recording for Delos, makes it into a ten-minute-long Passion aria. In a certain way, Esfahani feels like the harpsichord’s answer to the young Gould—exuberant, antisentimental, bracing.
Rondeau, a twenty-seven-year-old Parisian, belongs to a French-based harpsichord tradition that reaches back to the mighty Landowska. His penchant for mountain-man outfits, and the breathlessness of the French classical-music marketplace, have conspired to win him descriptions like “le bad boy de la musique baroque.” In fact, he is a deeply serious musician who fell in love with the harpsichord at the age of five. His interest in jazz and improvisation is hardly a distraction from his main work: the sort of slavish attention to the score encouraged by modern classical tradition is inadequate to the demands of Renaissance or Baroque music, in which players must embellish bare-bones notation with idiomatic style.
Rondeau has made disks of Rameau and the Bach family for the Erato label. For the online archive All of Bach—a gorgeous compendium of videos curated by the Netherlands Bach Society, eventually to encompass Bach’s entire output—he has recorded the Goldbergs. In April, he played the same work on a brief U.S. tour; I heard him at the First Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a concert presented by the Boston Early Music Festival, one of the nation’s foremost early-music organizations.
Esfahani’s taunt notwithstanding, Rondeau’s approach to the Goldbergs is highly unorthodox—even more so than Esfahani’s own. Rondeau’s recordings had prepared me for a pliable, unpredictable treatment of tempo, but in Cambridge the Goldbergs repeatedly slowed to a near-crawl, and I often longed for a steadier pulse. The Quodlibet, the culminating variation, typically unfolds as a rousing climax to the cycle, its interpolated folk-song airs adding a tone of merriment. Rondeau, however, rendered it almost as a counterpart to the Black Pearl, meandering and melancholy. In all, this was a fascinating but at times frustrating experience. The hazy acoustics of the First Church probably diminished the over-all effect. The All of Bach video delivers a more intimate perspective, and there I found Rondeau’s approach to be consistently more absorbing.
The Goldbergs end with a restatement of the Aria on which the variation sequence is based. In most performances, the return of that stately, pensive music after the preceding boisterousness has a jarring effect. Rondeau’s surprising choice to solemnize the Quodlibet eases the transition. Bach’s intellectual tour de force becomes a more inward, circular narrative—one that flows back inexorably to the place where it began. ♦
