Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988

Johann Sebastian Bach (Artist), Andras Schiff (Artist) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 30, 2003)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: ECM
• ASIN: B000094HLA
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #49,651 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #64 in Music > Classical > Forms & Genres > Variations

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect, September 26, 2005

By 

Musicus (Oslo, Norway) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (Audio CD)

I am astounded by the negative reviews below. I have listened to many versions of the Goldberg variations, but never any better than this. I don't think I ever will be bored by Schiff's performance here. This live-concert is even better than his 1983-interpretation and I don't think it is possible to improve this one. It is relaxing and stimulating at the same time, a feeling of completeness that never is boring.
Moreover, I have never noticed anything wrong about the sound quality and think we use to blame the sound quality when we don't like the way of playing.
By the modern piano, you will of course not get any historically informed baroque music, but I can easily forget this, by thinking of it as pure piano music, valid by the eternal & boundless reason of Bach's musical thinking. So if the listening doesn't bring me back to Bach's era, it gives me something else, not less valuable. I cannot put this on without imagining something very pure, something white, like clean, new snow, white, firm and soft at the same time.

45 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Celestial, October 19, 2003

By 

Gavin Wilson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (Audio CD)

I have several versions of the Goldberg Variations, and this one is ideally suited to the CD era. Just look at the length of it, for a start: 71.11 minutes. Of the others, Glenn Gould's first recording came in at an extraordinary 38.24 mins, but this was pushing the limit of what a 1950s LP could handle. Glenn Gould's second version, releaseed just after his death in the early 1980s, was 51.20 mins long. My least favourite version, on Naxos by Pi-hsien, is 55.08 minutes of muffled, murky piano-playing.

Andras Schiff performed this new version two years ago in front of an exceptionally silent audience in Basel. (No-one appears to cough or fidget at all -- only once in the entire concert did I detect someone dropping something.) The recording certainly has the ambience of the concert hall, but there's not even any applause at the end of the recital. (Contrast this with, say, another ECM label pianist, Keith Jarrett, performing live, where the audience behaves in almost the opposite manner.)

Clearly there is not the sound of each page of music being turned over. I am so new to piano-playing that I am still in awe of anyone who can keep so much music in his head. (That's one of the advantages of recording in the studio!)

As usual with ECM CDs, the packaging is immaculate: detailed notes by Schiff himself, who first recorded this work 20 years ago, and even an acrostic poem on his name by Vikram Seth, author of 'A Suitable Boy'.

Will this CD usurp any of the affection I have for both the Glenn Gould versions? No, they will continue to find a regular place in my CD player -- I just love their eccentricities, and I find their relative brevity easier to cope with. 71 minutes is almost too much music for my mind to handle, but this is a fantastic version. There is none of the mumbled singing that accompanies a Gould or Jarrett piano recording, and I'll just have to get used to the idea that maybe JSB didn't intend a vocal track when he composed the Goldbergs.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Variations Rediscovered, June 9, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (Audio CD)

Mr. Schiff's beautiful, brilliant, powerful performance rediscovers one of the top works of the greatest of musicians. For those of us that for years were used to Mr. Gould's 2 great versions of the Goldberg Variations, this is a unique chance to enjoy this masterpiece in all its freshness and strength all over again; there are many interesting differences between the recordings and the musical approach is definitely original. A must-buy for the lovers of J. S. Bach music.