Goldberg Variants

Tuesday was a pretty incredible evening.  I heard Angela Hewitt playing Bach's Goldberg Variations (completely from memory).*  I am still amazed that anyone can memorize such an immense and complicated piece of work.  I'm supposed to see her playing The Art of the Fugue next year at some point, and she may also play that from memory.  I do wonder if Hewitt attempts to play The Well-Tempered Clavier from memory, as she does tackle it from time to time (as a two-part concert I believe).  That would seem to be a bridge too far, at least for me.

What made the evening even more special (at least for me) was that they were interviewing Madeleine Thien about her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing and the connections between it and the Goldberg Variations.  I haven't read this book yet, but I've moved it quite a bit up on my reading list and expect to get to it at some point in August.

At any rate, the book is basically about the lives of three musicians in China, some (all?) of whom relocate to Canada after the Tienanmen Square massacre, though there are earlier chapters looking at how Western classical music was banned in China after the Cultural Revolution (and how that negatively impacted the musicians).  As an aside, Thien mentioned that any novel that even mentions Tienanmen Square is banned, so she knows there will never be an official translation of her novel into Mandarin Chinese, though it may well be published in Taiwan.  And a few Chinese readers told her that they struggled to get through the novel in the original English.

Thien said that Gould's Goldberg Variations popped up in her iPlayer shuffle at an opportune time (while she was depressed in Berlin).  She started listening to it constantly while writing her novel in cafes in Berlin (to drown out background noise).  It eventually became a leitmotif in the novel, but only later on.  The original Gould recording would have been known to the characters in the early chapters, but as she worked on the later parts of the novel, she switched to Gould's 2nd recording (from 1981).  She estimates that she listened to the piece close to 10,000 times while writing the novel!  But tonight would be the very first time she had seen it live!

I'm not quite sure how many times I've heard Gould's Goldberg, but probably only on the order of 20 times, and the 1981 recording probably only a couple of times.  (I suspect I shall listen to both again while reading the novel...)  On the other hand, I've seen the Goldberg Variations played three times (including last Tuesday), though this is actually the first time on piano.  I saw it played on harpsichord in Vancouver, and then Tafelmusik did some version for harpsichord and period music accompaniment back in 2016.  (I can't quite remember if the other instruments played throughout the entire piece or only on cadenzas.  I should probably see if I can find a review or even a recording of the event.)  It's a close thing, but I would probably give the palm to Hewitt for the most incredible performance.  Certainly looking forward to The Art of the Fugue next year!

* I should note that Hewitt dedicated her performance to Walter Homburger, who passed away on July 25.  He had been a massive figure in Toronto's classical music scene, promoting the TSO, and, perhaps even more critically, he was Glenn Gould's manager and landed him the recording contract that led to the Goldberg Variations (among dozens of other critically acclaimed albums).

Sadly the classical music scene also lost another major figure in July: the cellist Anner Bylsma.  He had close ties to many of the members of Tafelmusik and recorded with them several times, though I am not sure if he ever called Toronto home, even temporarily.  I have quite a few CDs featuring his playing, though I'll have to get a few more with a Tafelmusik connection and then a recording he did of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time.