Goldberg Variations: Two sides of Bach masterpiece make for fascinating listening

Bach’s influence on music is featured in a fascinating concert that examines the Goldberg Variations from two sides - classical and jazz

Paul Grabowsky performing in the Musica Viva concert. Picture: Anka Boychev

• Plenty of swing in ACO's Spanish conquest
• An uplifting walk in the forest
• A night of triumph and tears
• Head and shoulders above the rest

J.S. Bach was a great improviser, whether he was road-testing a new church organ or sitting at home playing his harpsichord, and it is this aspect of his music that has always attracted jazz musicians.

French pianist Jacques Loussier has made a lucrative career out of recording and performing his works with his jazz trio, and such luminaries as Django Reinhardt, Fats Waller and Bill Evans all paid tribute to Bach, so when Australian former child prodigy Andrea Lam and jazz doyen Paul Grabowsky were invited by Musica Viva to give their contrasting interpretations of the mighty Goldberg Variations the results were always going to be fascinating.

Lam, who returned to Australia in 2020 when her US career was scuttled by the Covid pandemic, had never performed the Aria and its 30 variations before Musica Viva artistic director Paul Kildea suggested the idea.

“My first encounter was as a music student many years ago, feeling cold and alone in my dorm room during a brutal New York winter. I casually popped in a CD of Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations. I did not move for 51 minutes,” Lam said.

For Grabowsky Bach was the man who had the greatest influence on his musical life. “I have spent hours looking at the harmonic structure of the Aria, playing it in all keys (major and minor) and combining various keys simultaneously. I’ve played with various tempos and grooves, and with greater and lesser adherence to form. I have set nothing in stone. Every performance will be different, a surprise not just to the audience, but to me.”

Andrea Lam performed Bach's Goldberg Variations in a Musica Viva two-hander concert. Picture: Anka Boychev

Lam, making her Musica Viva tour debut, opened the concert, coming on stage with the house lights down and lit by a single spot. The Aria was taken at a thoughtful pace, beautifully articulated and with a lucidity that set the seal on the diverse variations to come. The 32-measure tune – a sarabande played over a wandering bass line – is repeated at the end of the cycle, so it is both a hello and a farewell.

Lam’s performance did away with the repeats, so it came in at a manageable 40 minutes, during which she displayed a prodigious technique and balance during the challenging moments – crossed hand playing, tricky canons and fearful fugues included – only stumbling briefly in the tricky variation after the beautifully delivered “black pearl” adagio, and recovering with aplomb.

Grabowsky’s Improvisations on the Aria was a 40-minute miracle of in-the-moment composition and performance, displaying good taste in his choices while still somehow managing to retain the spirit of Bach, taking his audience to the realms of Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner.

After a thunderous middle section, Grabowsky pulled back to spacious, floating chords with a hypnotic repeated figure at the top of the keyboard. Gradually recognisable fragments of the original percolated through the remote chords and we wondered how he would get back to the home key for the repeat of the aria. We needn’t have worried – it was a safe landing.

The concert is repeated at City Recital Hall on Monday, June 20, at 7pm.

DETAILS

• CONCERT Musica Viva: Paul Grabowsky and Andrea Lam

• WHERE City Recital Hall

• WHEN June 18