Bach-Busoni: Goldberg Variations & other works (2021)

Romantic-style interpretations of Bach's music are enjoying a certain vogue, but few have taken golden-era pianism's liberties to such as extreme as does this reading of Bach's Goldberg Variations for keyboard, BWV 988, by pianist Chiyan Wong. What listeners of this Linn release will hear is a performance of Bach's text modified no fewer than four times. First, Bach's harpsichord work is played on a piano; second, it's a 1915 edition by Ferruccio Busoni that added extra octaves, bass lines, ornamentation, and more, wherein ... Read More

Romantic-style interpretations of Bach's music are enjoying a certain vogue, but few have taken golden-era pianism's liberties to such as extreme as does this reading of Bach's Goldberg Variations for keyboard, BWV 988, by pianist Chiyan Wong. What listeners of this Linn release will hear is a performance of Bach's text modified no fewer than four times. First, Bach's harpsichord work is played on a piano; second, it's a 1915 edition by Ferruccio Busoni that added extra octaves, bass lines, ornamentation, and more, wherein Busoni suggested omitting Bach's repeats and leaving out nine canonic variations altogether, cutting the work down to about a half an hour in length. Finally, Wong made changes of his own to this version, altering the difficult two-manual variations to make them a bit easier for the piano and mostly scrapping Busoni's final recurrence of the theme in favor of Bach's (still slightly modified) original. The listener's reaction to this will obviously be determined largely by their... Read Less