Page 237 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

When he made his last recording, it was also the Goldbergs, slow and meditative, listening to every note. It is a great mistake to assume that because you know every note of a piece, your audience will have spent the years with the piece that you have. You have to allow people time to absorb the beauty of the notes, the cleverness of the ornamentation.
Ornaments in music are called trills, turns, ascending and descending appoggiaturas, mordents, inverted mordents, grace notes, cadences, and so on. They are particular to a piece, to an era, and to a performer. Rosalyn Tureck, Ruth Laredo, Glenn Gould, Dinu Lipatti, Angela Hewitt, Konstantin Lifschitz, and Sviatoslav Richter on piano, or Trevor Pinnock, Gustav Leonhardt, Ton Koopman, William Christie, and Wanda Landowska on harpsichord, each one favors different timings, different notes where an ornament should begin or end. Each of us has a favorite.
As Russell Sherman used to say, you need the right edition to play a piece as the composer intended. Errors creep into texts over the years, and only the urtext editions, the purest and most scholarly versions, are acceptable at the highest levels of performance, in the great conservatories.
Try to hear how Bach takes a simple melody, the song or aria which begins the Goldberg Variations, and then explores it in 30 different ways. By the end, he has deconstructed the original melody into varieties of spiritual and emotional experiences.
Here is a very brief guide for each variation, not including the original aria:
Variation 1: Rapid scales; an elegant dance or polonaise.
Variation 2: A timeless, syncopated treble melody over a syncopated “walking” bass line. The left hand plays the bass, the right hand the treble.
Variation 3 Canone all’Unisono: The scales are in the left hand; the right hand plays triplets, groups of three notes which make a wonderful joyous dance. This is the pianistic equivalent of rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time.
Variation 4: A passepied, where you pass your foot over your other foot, or your hand over your other hand. The brilliance here is that the left hand imitates or turns upside down the melody started by the right hand. Like a canon, the left hand starts a bit after the right hand, but the mirror images meet in unexpected places to make, not a pedantic repetitive form, but a fractal pattern of brilliant unexpected harmonies made up of predictable patterns. The universe is structured like this: the chaos of inspiration leaping out of the anchor of structure, both opposites tumbling over each other like bears playing.
Variation 5: The right hand plays rapid scales, and the left hand crosses over to make comments with single notes and ornaments. The two hands mix perfectly, so it sounds more complex than Bach’s brilliant solution, which is to cheat and transfer the singing treble to the double-crossing left hand, which sneaks out of its basement to play on the swings.
Variation 6: Canone alla Seconda: Note the groups of five notes, one for each finger. This is a canon, where the second group of five starts a bit late and overlaps and then the next group overlaps the second, et cetera. Despite the brilliant mathematics of the complex form, the effect is of a lush and comforting song.
Variation 7: Al tempo di Giga: This is a jig from the
Canary Islands, syncopated and slightly wistful. The ornaments are rapid scales leading to the end note, which is the “point” of the ornament, to decorate one note with many others. Rachmaninoff used this technique in a virtuosic kaleidoscope of intersecting melodies and digres- sions, derived from simpler melodies, as this Bach jig swirls around an easygoing core.
2018 Summer Season 237