Glenn Gould, Lang Lang,
and les barricades mystèrieuses
by Angus Verspeeten

The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould burst onto the aural scene in 1955 with his ear-opening recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations. Now jocular, now limpid, by turns pensive and danceable, Gould's performance was a young man's discovery and celebration of life in one of the monuments of human art. As often happens with such monuments, so much serious scholarship and reverential playing had accreted to the Goldberg Variations that, until Gould, people had forgotten that it was a work of profound, though not unalloyed, joy.

Thirty years later, shortly before his death, Gould recorded the variations again. If the 1955 version was a spring day in the Bavarian Alps, the 1985 version was a winter night beside the frozen Baltic Sea. Same music, same pianist, same world. But. But.

In that "but" lies mystery, much the same mystery that we encounter in quantum physics, observing the electron just before and just after a quantum leap. What happens in that interim? Where does it happen? How? Why?

Since Gould showed the listening world that there was a great deal more to Bach than stereotypical teutonic stoicism, other pianists, generally possessed of more bravado and a lot less talent, have had a go at the piece with decidedly mixed results.

A wrenching case in point is Andras Schiff's tortured rendering (rending?). Himself a musician of formidable means, Schiff seems determined to out-Gould Gould. If, as I believe is the case, the Goldberg Variations are dance music for the fingers, Schiff's performance shows the danger involved when you know all the virtuosic steps perfectly but forget Kleist's great insight about the role of the heart when great dancers dance.

At the opposite extreme is the recent highly praised recording by Murray Perahia. Again, all the notes are there (these days, with our legions of super-trained young musicians, all the notes are always there), and more or less at the right time. "More or less" because what Mr. Perahia has given us is an elegant, over-qualified lounge-pianist's performance. Unlike Schiff, here there's heart aplenty. The only problem is, Mr. Perahia's heart is not just on his sleeve, it's on each of the 88 keys, the result being a kind of contrapuntal "September Song" cut into icy shards by the standard current Steinway brilliance.

I know this is sounding like predictable curmudgeonly stuff, yr faithfl critic living in (and on) the glories of the musical past. Actually, I would've kept all these barbs sheathed if a young pianist had not appeared who gives indication of being another Glenn Gould. He hasn't recorded the Goldberg Variations (yet). But no matter.

Lang Lang (can you imagine how his New York agent must have talked to him about that?) is a 19-year-old from China. Now based in the United States and studying with Gary Graffman, Mr. Lang is as lively as Gould was, as thoughtful, and as mysterious at the keyboard.

What does he do that's so different? Beats me. How does he do it? Beats me.

But for this pair of ears, there's no doubt that he's able to cross the mysterious barricade that separates the merely very good from the astoundingly great. Lang's first CD is basically a first-recital program, recorded with audience at Tanglewood: There's Hayden, Rachmaninov, and some lovely bravura 19th-century glop.

But the kicker is the six late Brahms pieces.

Brahms. Talk about accretion. For a century, the Germans, aided and abetted by just about everybody else, have been working really hard at genuflecting before the last of the three B's. In most every Brahms performance, whether of the symphonies, the songs, the solo works, the choral pieces, the chamber music, you have the feeling that the performers are playing a musical game called "Can You Top This Effulgent Seriousness?"

After a hundred years of such treatment, Brahms it seems to me is pretty much on life-support. Hardly breathing, the music as given to us is stodgy, labored, lead-footed.

Then along comes one itinerant young Mongolian who tosses off six late piano pieces. The accretion falls away and you see and hear Brahms for the graceful, flowing, endlessly clever composer that he was.

Barricades? What barricades? Lang Lang walks through them as if they're not there and leads us, improbably, into a land of pure Brahmsian delight (and that ain't no oxymoron).

END

For more info on each of the recordings at Amazon:

Gould 1955
Gould 1985
Schiff
Perahia
Lang

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