Strip away the glitz and glamour, and ignore the media circus that seems to surround every appearance he makes, and Lang Lang is a highly talented pianist, and a serious-minded musician. Bach’s Goldberg Variations certainly isn’t a work to take on unless you’re a serious musician, and though the release of Lang’s recording has been surrounded by the usual hype, it’s a signal, surely, that he wants to be judged on his merits as an artist rather than as a celebrity.
His recording is released in a “de luxe edition” that includes two performances spread extravagantly across four discs. One was recorded under studio conditions, the other is taken from a concert that Lang gave in the Thomaskirche, Bach’s church in Leipzig, in early March this year.
Unfortunately the lavishness of the packaging isn’t the only indulgence here. There are flashes of perfectly weighted, stylistically appropriate playing, but too much of Lang’s performances seems to squeeze all the energy out of the music, with tempi that are achingly slow and phrasing that is so mannered it sometimes seems more appropriate for Rachmaninov than Bach. He seems to love the music so much he suffocates it: the 15th variation, the canon at the fifth, is so measured it almost grinds to a halt; the last of them, the Quodlibet, is so stately that the quiet re-emergence of the Aria loses its usual magic.
The Thomaskirche performance is marginally the less studied and self-indulgent of the two; tempi are generally a bit faster, the piano sound a little leaner and not so fulsome. But there are still moments when Lang’s mannerisms and rubato appear entirely contrived, and the ornaments with which he decorates the repeats seem to be added out of good manners rather than instinctively. Among piano versions of the Goldberg, if Glenn Gould’s recordings remain unsurpassed for many of us, there are plenty of other options for those allergic to Gould, from András Schiff and Igor Levit to Peter Serkin and Angela Hewitt. Lang’s performance doesn’t come close to any of those.
This week’s other pick
Igor Levit’s latest release for Sony Classical is Encounter, a fascinatingly linked pair of discs beginning with Busoni’s transcriptions of 10 of Bach’s Chorale Preludes and ending with Morton Feldman’s final piano work, Palais de Mari. There are arrangements of Brahms, too – Busoni’s versions of the organ Chorale Preludes, the last pieces Brahms wrote, and Reger’s transcriptions of the Four Serious Songs. It’s a sequence of increasing introspection, steadily stripping away inessentials, until all that’s left are Feldman’s gentle spare phrases, all beautifully rendered by Levit.
