Bach: Goldberg Variations – Fazil Say

Every pianist arrives at the Goldberg Variations eventually, the way certain rivers all eventually find the sea, and Fazil Say — Turkish firebrand, sometime provocateur, composer of his own unruly scores — has taken his time getting there. He tells us as much in his booklet note: years of deliberation over fingering, tempo, the whole architecture of the thing, before he trusted himself with it on record. That patience shows. What doesn’t show, unfortunately, is much evidence that anyone in the control room at the Ahmed Adnan Saygun Arts Centre in Izmir was paying close attention.

But first, the pianism, because it deserves to be heard past the flaws in its packaging.

Say plays with the kind of unbuttoned exuberance that recalls — inevitably, and I do mean inevitably, because every review of this piece must eventually genuflect in this direction — the young Gould of 1955. Not the mannered, hyper-articulated Gould of the 1981 remake, all glacial tempi and studio isolation, but the kid who sat down and played Bach like he’d just discovered gravity didn’t apply to him. Say’s runs have that same unhurried haste, if such a paradox can be forgiven; the sixteenth notes in Variation 5 tumble out with a puppyish energy, articulate but never merely correct. His touch in Variation 15, the first canon in minor mode, achieves a kind of hushed filigree — voicing so refined you can practically hear the piano’s dampers breathing. The following variation, that boisterous French overture writ small, he dispatches with real wit, the dotted rhythms snapping like a well-pressed tablecloth.

Where he departs from reverence — deliberately, I think — is in refusing to treat the work as a species of secular scripture. Rosalyn Tureck approached the Goldbergs as though genuflecting before a high altar; every variation arrives freighted with implication, every pause a small sermon. I’ve never fully warmed to that school of thought, admiring though I am of her scholarship. Say goes the other direction entirely. The famous “Black Pearl,” Variation 25 — that long chromatic wander through minor-key sorrow that Wanda Landowska so memorably named — Say plays quickly. Too quickly, some listeners will feel, robbing it of the suspended, almost Chopin-esque melancholy that pianists from Angela Hewitt to András Schiff have made their showpiece. I missed that ache, a little. But it’s consistent with his overall reading: this is a Goldberg conceived as living organism rather than devotional object, thirty variations of curiosity and delight rather than thirty stations of a cross.

And then there’s the sound.

I don’t know what happened here, technically — the booklet is silent on the instrument, silent on the hall’s acoustic treatment, silent on nearly everything a curious listener would want to know — but something in this album fights the pianist at every turn. Climaxes turn hard-edged, almost steely, with a reverberant clangor that borders on distortion in the bigger fortissimo variations. Variation 14’s cascading hand-crossings, which should sparkle, instead clatter, the overtones smearing into a kind of metallic haze. It’s as though the engineers wanted us to hear the room more than the instrument in it, and the room, frankly, isn’t interesting enough to earn the attention.

This matters more than usual because Bach’s own conception of the Goldbergs — written, per the old story now somewhat discredited by scholars, for Count Kaiserling’s insomnia, performed by his young harpsichordist Johann Gottlieb Goldberg — depends so heavily on transparency. The two-manual harpsichord for which it was composed allows voices to separate cleanly even in the most contrapuntally congested variations; a modern concert grand already muddies that clarity somewhat, and a hard, over-reverberant recording muddies it further still. Glenn Gould understood this instinctively and recorded in acoustically dry studios for exactly that reason. Say’s instrument — a big-boned concert instrument, from the sound of it, possibly voiced on the bright side to begin with — needed a gentler hand at the mixing desk than it got.

I keep returning to how much I like the playing underneath all this. The Aria that opens and closes the work breathes with unaffected simplicity, ornaments placed like small confidences rather than display. The quodlibet, that joyous folk-song mashup crowning the whole structure before the Aria’s return, has real belly laughs in it. Say clearly loves this piece — has lived with it, argued with it, made peace with it on his own terms.

So: a interpretation I’d recommend with genuine enthusiasm, wrapped in a recording I can’t recommend at all without reservation. Collectors wanting fire and spontaneity should still probably reach first for Gould ‘55, or for Schiff’s ECM remake, or even Say’s countryman-in-spirit Murray Perahia, whose 2000 Sony recording combines comparable vitality with infinitely superior engineering. This Izmir Goldberg is a near-miss — a fine mind and formidable artistry undone, at least partially, by circumstances outside the artist’s control. A pity. It deserved better ears in the booth.