Someone once said that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it could
be reconstructed from James Joyce’s Ulysses. I think that
if the entire body of Western Civilization were suddenly snatched
away from us, save one work of art, we could rebuild a good chunk
of it, if that one remaining work were Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
It transcends mere musical expression - though it is saturated
with that - by incorporating philosophical, mathematical, architectural,
rhetorical and even religious ideas in a density that is unmatched
by any other work. The variable factor in rebuilding the western
world from the Goldbergs would be: Which performance to use? The
unperformed score itself is only a blueprint for a world awaiting
creation.
The world according to Rosalyn Tureck’s Goldbergs would be
monumental, built out of marble columns and wide-open spaces.
Vladimir Feltsman’s would be a topsy-turvy house painted audacious
colors, with the occasional door opening on the top floor into
mid-air and some of the windows underground. Young Glenn Gould’s
world would be nothing more than a piano in a warm, late-night
room. Older Gould’s reconstructed world would be nothing but
clouds, light and midnight sun. Murray Perahia’s world would
be one of poise, grace and piety, an entire city of interconnected,
elegant buildings.
As much as I love all those performances, I had never found
myself forced to consider this: Where is the human element in
all these worlds? But the recent Bayer recording by Burkard
Schliessmann dares to put the question front and center, and
in the process creates a distinctive profile, one that not everyone
will like; see Dominy Clements’ decidedly unimpressed
review.
Great artists can polarize, and the intensely thoughtful Schliessmann
has never shied away from pursuing deep and subtle shades of
expression where others play to the gallery. The pianist ups
the ante here by daring to bring his connotation-rich, philosophical
style to a piece that is considered by some a sacred tome not
open to experimentation. Clements’ review shows a positive antipathy
for Schliessmann’s no-stone-unturned approach, but for listeners
who don’t mind his questioning of every old assumption, Schliessmann
can be revelatory.
What strikes me throughout this recording is the sense that
Schliessmann is always searching for what is conversational
in this music. Where Gould and Tureck awe the listener, Schliessmann
makes these thirty variations sound human and approachable.
This is the recording for all those who have previously found
the Goldberg Variations too abstract and unfriendly.
Yet there are layers of things going on, too, which can satisfy
the connoisseur hoping to find new discoveries.
While this is worlds away from being a period-style performance,
Schliessmann nonetheless adapts some historically-informed practices,
such as playing runs of continuous short-value notes unevenly,
giving those parts a gentle swing. It’s something that isn’t
done very often, certainly not by mid-twentieth century pianists
like Gould and Tureck, who were trained to play notes as written,
as opposed to the natural swing that used to be commonplace
in classical music until theorists squeezed the life out of
it. Listen, for instance, to Variation 1, where Schliessmann
jettisons the usual stiff-collar approach and instead gives
the passing figurations a gentle swing. At first hearing, it
may even sound unintentionally uneven, but then one can always
go listen for comparison to the deadly even scales and runs
Schliessmann deploys in his Godowsky arrangements of Strauss
waltzes or his Liszt transcriptions of Schubert songs on his
DVD (ArtHaus Musik 100455).
Another example of how human Schliessmann makes this music
sound is Variation 23, where Schliessmann finds wit and
shape that others only hint at. Those who expect their baroque
keyboard music to have the regularity of a sewing machine might
not like the way Schliessmann shades the rhythms, but I love
it. He makes every polyphonic voice independent, as if it weren’t
one person playing all these notes, but rather a small orchestra
of pianists, each one an individual. Schliessmann’s Goldbergs
are populated with dozens, perhaps hundreds of such characters.
Friends, enemies, teachers, laborers, family, lovers, they are
all here, living life. No other Goldberg, for better
or worse, is more full of personal, human touches than this
one. Some would call it a romantic approach, but I’m not convinced
that is true. I think that the true romantic approach is Perahia’s.
For all Perahia’s lucid, Mozartian poise, he shapes the entire
work with a dramatic, programmatic sense. Schliessmann instead
lives inside each variation, more interested in each section’s
inner life than in pushing the whole piece toward a climactic
point. This thoughtful characterization naturally gives Variation
29 and Variation 30, the quodlibet, layers of richness
that make them grand summations, even as they amble comfortably
along.
Though Schliessmann is often identified with romantic piano
music, he’s no romantic. He’s onto something new, an artistic
“ism” that hasn’t been named yet. If score literalism can be
taken at this point as a very twentieth-century phenomenon,
it seems that a new artistic philosophy is emerging in the twenty-first.
If the old school, whether it be Gustav Leonhardt’s Bach or
Pierre Boulez’s Mahler, is based on the denotations of the score
and historical documentation, the emerging new school is one
of connotations, finding the connections no one ever noticed
before, both within a piece of music, and outside it as well.
Schliessmann’s Goldbergs teem with life because he plays
not like someone who spends 12 hours a day practicing (which,
for all I know, he may), but rather like someone who reads books,
talks with friends, views art, travels to historic sites and,
simply, lives. Schliessmann may be a musician, but more importantly,
he’s a human being.
Like Schliessmann’s
other Bayer recordings, this disc is given gorgeous, high-resolution
sound. I had a little trouble getting my Sony SACD player to recognize
the hybrid layers, but once it did, I found lively, three-dimensional
sound in the multichannel layer. The regular CD layer is quite
good in its own right, richer and warmer than any standard CD
from more than ten years ago. Incidentally, the performance is
spread over two discs, but it’s priced as one. Though it is in
fact possible to fit more than 80 minutes on one disc, the amount
of manufacturing defects skyrockets when that is done. Instead,
Bayer wisely opted to split the work at its natural break, leaving
two discs of around 40 minutes, which can be manufactured with
virtually no defects. Since the piece naturally cleaves between
Variation 15 and the “Ouverture,” as Bach designated Variation
16, it doesn’t bother me in the least. The accompanying booklet
also contains sizeable essays by Schliessmann himself, who offers
much food for thought as he talks about the theoretical and practical
aspects of both playing and understanding the variations.
In summary, this is a Goldberg Variations for those
who want to get inside the piece and live inside it, instead
of admiring it from afar as it sits on a marble pedestal. Recommended
warmly for those adventurous enough to enjoy hearing an old
favourite transformed into something new.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
see also Review
by Dominy Clements
Burkard Schliessmann
(piano)
[38:06 + 45:00] 
