Bach: Goldberg Variations (2007)

The much talked-about German pianist Burkard Schliessmann, after several recordings of Romantic literature, now weighs in with Bach's mighty Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, taken with all repeats and just deliberately enough that it requires two compact discs to contain the whole. Schliessmann in his Germanically abstruse yet pertinent booklet notes, quotes Glenn Gould several times and has seemingly set out to pick up with the variations where Gould left off. That's a tall order inasmuch as Gould's Goldberg recordings, ... Read More

The much talked-about German pianist Burkard Schliessmann, after several recordings of Romantic literature, now weighs in with Bach's mighty Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, taken with all repeats and just deliberately enough that it requires two compact discs to contain the whole. Schliessmann in his Germanically abstruse yet pertinent booklet notes, quotes Glenn Gould several times and has seemingly set out to pick up with the variations where Gould left off. That's a tall order inasmuch as Gould's Goldberg recordings, whether you like them or not, derive their value from their ability to transport the listener into Gould's personal universe -- there is no Gould school, and for good reason. Schliessmann's interpretation certainly resembles Gould's in its externals: in the use of the pedals, in the heavy connectedness of the sharply articulated passagework, and in the radically pianistic conception of the work as a whole. He keeps closer to the 1955 Gould recording than to the later one with its tempo... Read Less