**Bach: *Goldberg Variations***
Markus Becker, piano. CPO 555 555–2. Recorded [dates], [venue]. CD [timing].
Markus Becker’s Goldberg Variations arrives with a booklet essay bearing the title “Play it again, John, or, Sleepless in Dresden“—that “or” tells you everything about CPO’s marketing department and precisely nothing about the performance within. One suspects Becker himself would wince. He seems, on the evidence here, a man temperamentally allergic to such cuteness.
Born in 1963, Becker teaches at Hanover and has recorded all twelve discs’ worth of Max Reger’s piano music. Keep that Reger credential in mind—it explains much about what follows, and not entirely to the pianist’s advantage.
The sound itself is radiant. Ugliness never intrudes; Becker possesses a remarkably smooth, even touch that serves the counterpoint with scrupulous transparency. The CPO engineers have captured this clarity faithfully, perhaps too faithfully—every pedaled phrase ending announces itself with slightly obtrusive resonance. But the fundamental problem isn’t technical. It’s conceptual.
I cannot recall hearing the Goldbergs played with such relentless sameness. Becker treats the thirty variations as a gradually unfolding meditation rather than Bach’s supremely varied compilation of dance forms and character pieces. Fair enough—that’s a defensible approach, even an attractive one in theory. The trouble is that “gradually unfolding” becomes “glacially static” when executed with this degree of uniformity in color, tempo, and dynamic range.
Consider Variation 6, with its fearsome hand-crossing. Here, surely, a formidable craft (which Becker undeniably possesses) might indulge in some virtuosic display? No. The trills in the fughettas are marvellously even, never disrupting the contrapuntal elaboration. One can admire the thoughtfulness while yearning for something more—more sparkle, more risk, more joy.
Variation 17 passes by without the slightest hint of wildness. I’m not suggesting Becker should emulate Maria Yudina’s crazy quadrille through this movement, but at the opposite extreme his approach feels merely ploddy. When he reaches the Canon at the fourth (Variation 12), which he clearly intends as the first moment of genuine calm, he paces it at roughly half the expected tempo. The grand architectural scheme remains intact. The pulse doesn’t.
Only with Bach’s two explicit expression markings—the "Andante" of Variation 15 and that extraordinary "Adagio" of Variation 25, the Black Pearl—does Becker allow himself real liberty. These are touchingly, simply done, free of sentimentality. The "Adagio" in particular unfolds with affecting directness. But two variations out of thirty hardly constitute sufficient contrast.
By the time we reach “Cabbages and turnips have driven me away,” the final Quodlibet lacks its usual bittersweet quality—that sense of an old friend encountered unexpectedly at journey’s end, familiar yet somehow transformed by everything that’s preceded it. Instead it feels like a mechanical return, the aria afterward a dutiful closing of the circle rather than a culmination.
That Reger discography makes sense now. Becker brings to Bach the same conscientious balance, the same methodical clarity he presumably applied to those twelve discs of dense, chromatic late-Romanticism. It’s a temperament better suited to untangling Reger’s complexities than to illuminating Bach’s dances.
Your admiration may be quickly won by the sheer technical accomplishment and intellectual seriousness on display. Affection will prove more stubborn. I closed the booklet (wincing again at that title) with respect for Becker’s pianism but little desire to return to this oddly monochromatic traversal of one of keyboard literature’s most varied and varying masterworks.
