Piano Recital by Víkingur Ólafsson

J.S. Bach　　　　Goldberg Variations, BWV 988




The performance will run for about 1 hour and 15 minutes with no intermission.

Members of the audience are strongly advised to arrive punctually.  Latecomers and those who leave their seats during the performance will not be admitted and not allowed to return to their seats respectively.

The programme does not represent the views of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.

The presenter reserves the right to change the programme.

“Ólafsson takes Bach playing to a whole new, incredible level”  BBC Music Magazine

“Breathtakingly brilliant pianist”  Gramophone
 

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has made a profound impact with his remarkable combination of highest level musicianship and visionary programmes.  His recordings for Deutsche Grammophon – Philip Glass Piano Works (2017), Johann Sebastian Bach (2018), Debussy Rameau (2020), Mozart & Contemporaries (2021) and From Afar (2022) – captured the public and critical imagination and have led to career streams of over 600 million.

In October 2023, Ólafsson released his anticipated new album on Deutsche Grammophon of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  Ólafsson dedicated his 2023/24 season to a Goldberg Variations world tour, performing the work across six continents.  He brought Bach’s masterpiece to major concert halls, including London’s Southbank Centre, New York’s Carnegie Hall, Wiener Konzerthaus, Philharmonie de Paris, Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, Harpa Concert Hall, Walt Disney Hall, Sala São Paulo, Shanghai Symphony Hall, Tonhalle Zürich, Philharmonie Berlin, Mupa Budapest, KKL Luzern and Alte Oper Frankfurt, to name a few.

Now one of the most sought-after artists of today, Ólafsson’s multiple awards include Opus Klassik Instrumentalist of the Year (2023), Opus Klassik Solo Recording Instrument (twice), International Nordic Person of the Year (2023), Rolf Schock Prize for Music (2022), Gramophone’s Artist of the Year (2019), and Album of the Year at the BBC Music Magazine Awards (2019).

A captivating communicator both on and off stage, Ólafsson’s significant talent extends to broadcast, having presented several of his own series for television and radio.  He was Artist in Residence for three months on BBC Radio 4’s flagship arts programme, Front Row – broadcasting live during lockdown from an empty Harpa concert hall in Reykjavík and reaching millions of listeners around the world.


 

Information provided by the artist

Goldberg Variations, BWV 988
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

J.S. Bach arranged to have the work widely known as the Goldberg Variations printed in 1741 – nine years before his death – by a publisher friend in Nuremberg.  The following description (as translated from German into English) appears on the title page of BWV 988: “Keyboard exercise, consisting of an ARIA with diverse variations for a harpsichord with two manuals.  Composed for connoisseurs, for the refreshment of their spirits, by Johann Sebastian Bach, composer for the Royal Court of Poland and the Electoral Court of Saxony, Kapellmeister, and Director of Choral Music in Leipzig. Nuremberg, Balthasar Schmid, publisher”.

The nickname Goldberg Variations does not come from Bach himself.  It originates from a bit of lore that has been transmitted through the ages, as first recorded by the composer’s early biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel.  According to Forkel, Bach wrote this music in response to a commission from Count Hermann Karl von Keyserling, a Russian diplomat from a family of Baltic German nobility who served as ambassador to the Court of August III in Dresden and Warsaw.  A victim of insomnia, the Count was said to have requested music that could be played for him by the young harpsichordist, organist and composer who accompanied him on his travels, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (1727-1756).  His desire was for music “which should be of such a smooth and somewhat lively character that [Count Keyserling] might be a little cheered up by them in his sleepless nights,” Forkel wrote.

The alleged association with insomnia has resulted in the silly misunderstanding by some that the Goldberg Variations were intended to be used as some sort of sleep remedy.  That comically nonsensical claim – which has even inspired some scientific experiments – ignores the colourful description Forkel offers of how the Count “never tired” of “his variations” and compensated Bach with “a golden goblet filled with 100 louis-d’or”.

In any case, the Bach expert Christoph Wolff, like most scholars today, rejects Forkel’s account of a special commission for several reasons.  One is the fact a formal dedication would have been standard practice for such a commission, yet Bach’s score lacks one.  Additionally, the musician Goldberg himself would have been only a young teenager of 14 when he was asked to learn and perform this composition for his employer.  However precocious the young harpsichordist might have been – in fact he took lessons with Bach in Leipzig – he would have needed to command an extraordinary maturity to be capable of executing this virtuosic score.

Bach had previously published three collections of so-called “Keyboard Exercises” (his term was Clavier-Űbung) for harpsichord and organ, beginning with the Six Partitas in 1731 and also including such works as the Italian Concerto and French Overture.  For this reason, Wolff interprets the title page of the Goldberg Variations to signify that it belongs to this project as the fourth instalment, even though it is not specifically described as “Part IV”.  He argues that Bach intended this set of variations to serve as the “grandiose finale” to his educational anthology of works dedicated to illustrating the potential of the solo keyboard.

Such a project would be in harmony with Bach’s characteristically encyclopaedic thoroughness, since the variation format was a type of composition Bach had largely left untouched until this point.  Curiously, the biographer Forkel writes that Bach had previously considered writing variations “an ungrateful task on account of the repeatedly similar harmonic foundation”.  It is precisely one of the glories of the Goldberg Variations that the composer here reveals an infinite variety despite the restrictions entailed by this format.

The Goldberg Variations represent “the largest-scaled single keyboard work published at any time during the 18th century,” according to the Bach authority Robert L. Marshall.  Not until Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and Diabelli Variations do we encounter creations for solo keyboard that achieve a comparable degree of monumentality.

For Víkingur Ólafsson, the phenomenon of Bach’s legacy is itself based on a matrix of variations.  The music he left posterity is not a static, unchanging entity but a malleable reality because “every element is up for debate: tempi, dynamics, proportions, articulation – the list goes on”.  If we open a score such as that of the Goldberg Variations, “a paradox immediately reveals itself: the music is incredibly rich and strikingly sparse at the same time.  The musical structures are very detailed, but there are hardly any indications as to how you should go about shaping them in performance”.  Bach’s music, according to the pianist from Iceland, is “greater than any individual, any generation, any school of thought. Indeed, Bach’s music is greater than Bach himself”.

This assertion seems readily borne out by the reception history of the Goldberg Variations over the past century.  Christoph Wolff has shown that the first edition was already “circulating quite widely,” though we lack documentation as to actual public performances before the late 19th and the 20th centuries.  But ever since the Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska’s first-ever recording in the early 1930s, the Goldberg Variations have gone through an astonishing variety of transformations – variations on variations.  Glenn Gould’s first recording, made at the age of 22 in 1955, itself wrote music history and marked a major turning point that established the widespread popularity of this work while also confirming its status an archetype of “classical music”.

“Making the work our own is the enduring and unique challenge of the Goldberg Variations,” observes Ólafsson.  “As a work ‘not of an age, but for all time,’ to borrow Ben Jonson’s words on Shakespeare, we performers must somehow feel like we have taken part in its creation, that we have reinvented it in some way for our contemporaries”.  The pianist goes on to liken the epic work to “a grand oak tree, no less magnificent, but somehow organic, living and vibrant, its forms both responsive and regenerative, its leaves constantly unfurling to produce musical oxygen for its admirers through some metaphysical, time-bending photosynthesis.”

The obituary for Bach that was co-written by his son Carl Philipp Emmanuel attempts to pinpoint the unique quality of the family patriarch’s genius with a statement that could almost serve as a summary of the Goldberg Variations: “He need only have heard any theme to be aware – it seemed in the same instant – of almost every intricacy that artistry could produce in the treatment of it”.

This claim brings to mind the artist Michelangelo’s ability to perceive the finished statue embedded in an uncarved block of marble.  Yet whereas the sculptor focuses on one ideal form buried in the material, Bach approaches his theme as the scaffolding on which to build an endlessly fascinating succession of 30 utterly distinct perspectives.

The intricacy and coherence of Bach’s construction are apparent on the macrocosmic as well as the microcosmic levels.  Consider the carefully wrought symmetry and numerological symbolism of the Goldberg Variations.  The Aria, the basis of what is varied, consists of 32 bars, and the 30 variations in question are framed by the first full presentation of the Aria and its reprise at the end, making for a total of 32 “numbers”.  These 32 bars are in turn symmetrically subdivided, so that each half, comprising 16 measures, is repeated.  The issue of how closely this structure of repetition should be adhered to for each of the variations is one of the many elements “up for debate,” in Ólafsson’s interpretation.

Bach articulates the Aria’s melody in triple meter, which, within the system of his musicological symbology, held the status of tempus perfectum – the perfect meter – because of the association of three with the Holy Trinity in Christian theology.  This Aria, according to Wolff, originated before 1741 – a copy exists of the Aria in the hand of the composer’s second wife, Anna Magdalena – and a set of variations Handel published in 1733 may have provided the inspiration for Bach’s concept of a grand variation structure unfolding over a bass scheme.

The Aria has been classified as a sarabande, the dignified dance in triple meter inherited from Spain and long since transformed into a slow court dance.  Bach was fond of turning to the sarabande for especially weighty musical reflections, as in the corresponding movements of his suites for solo cello.

As the Aria unfolds, Bach juxtaposes major and minor keys (G major and E minor) in such a way that a smaller scale journey of statement-departure-return is embedded in the theme from the outset, with an implicit sense of “homecoming” in the transition back to G major.  This anticipates the experience of listening to the entire, monumental work when the Aria is reprised following the “detours” of 30 variations.  Within this larger scheme, Variation 16 has an architecturally significant position in the design as the halfway point.  It thus marks a “new beginning” and takes the form of an “Overture” in the French style.

What actually gets varied in the Goldberg Variations? Intricate ornamentation adorns the Aria’s serene melody, but it is not the melody itselft that is the focus of the variations.  Rather, the variations are guided by the continually recurring bass line and the harmonic progression that it traces.  The 30 variations consist of three distinct types.  Bach presents ten instances of each type, and the pattern starts over again with every third variation.  The first type (Variation Nos. 1, 4, 7, etc.) involves a wide-ranging survey of different genres – invention, passepied, gigue, and so on.  The second type of variation in each group of three turns towards a more overt display of virtuosity.  And the third variation type treats the theme as a two-part canon, separating the voices by intervals that steadily increase in distance, from unison (No. 3) to a ninth (No. 27).

Bach does not proceed in a merely abstract fashion, however.  Each variation is imbued with its own defining tempo, rhythmic character, mood, and type of ornamentation.  The Goldberg Variations juxtapose dramatic contrasts across the unifying devices of its large-scale structure.  A sense of liberating joy coexists with the most abysmal spiritual pain (as in the minor-key Adagio Variation No. 25, which Wanda Landowska unforgettably labelled the “Black Pearl” Variation).  Rather than a canon at the tenth, the final Variation, No. 30, is a so-called quodlibet: Latin for “whatever you please,” referring to a kind of light-hearted, mixed musical soup that uses the disciplined art of counterpoint to weave together a selection of tunes familiar from folk or popular music.

With the reprise of the Aria at the end of this journey, Bach conveys a sense of Paradise regained: a destination that feels at once familiar and yet lightyears removed from the innocent state of its initial statement.  Forkel was indisputably correct in one of his claims about the Goldberg Variations: despite Count Keyserling’s extravagant payment, “even had the gift been a thousand times larger, their artistic value would not yet have been paid for”.
 

English programme notes provided by Thomas May
Chinese translation provided by KCL Language Consultancy Ltd.

Piano Recital by Víkingur Ólafsson

DATE

VENUE

PRICE

11.06.2024 (Tue)
20:00

Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre

$650, $550, $450, $350, $250

BUY NOW

DATE

11.06.2024 (Tue)
20:00

VENUE

Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre

PRICE

$650, $550, $450, $350, $250

BUY NOW

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Explore Bach’s Goldberg Variations

Explore the 18th-century masterpiece, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, in this engaging talk.  We’ll delve into the structure and unique aspects of the work, featuring insights from celebrated pianist Vikingur Olafsson.  Through recordings by renowned artists, participants will experience the diverse interpretative approaches that bring this piece to life.


Date: 11 Jun 2024 (Tue) 

Time: 6:45pm

Venue: Foyer Reception Area, 4/F, Auditoria Building, Hong Kong Cultural Centre

Speaker: Calvin Lai (Music Educator)

Conducted in Cantonese.  The talk will run for about 1 hour.

Admission free on a first come, first served basis.