Bach to basics

The churning, rheumatic mechanism of a harpsichord — notes needling your ears like drops of acid rain — doesn’t necessarily play well to an audience whose sensibilities have been moulded around the picture-perfect delicacies of the classical piano. J.S. Bach’s freakishly popular Goldberg Variations remains best known through the recording made by the oddball Canadian pianist Glenn Gould in 1955, a record that would bleed unexpectedly into mainstream consciousness. For a whole generation, the sound of the Goldbergs became interchangeable with Gould’s quicksilver fingers — and a collective amnesia grew around the fact that Bach had actually conceived his most famous keyboard work for the harpsichord.

Six decades on, a pair of brand-new recordings — by the veteran pianist Angela Hewitt on Hyperion and by the thirty-something harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani on Deutsche Grammophon — finds that the common language of the Goldbergs is still being divided by the instrumental hardware on which the work is performed. Juggernaut modern grand pianos, tailor-made for the brawn of late-period Beethoven sonatas, can too easily leave the intricate mesh of Bach’s lines overwhelmed. True enough, the robust architecture of note against note, and line moving against line, means that the music always remains sturdily bulletproof over the long haul — even if you played the Goldbergs on kazoo its essence would remain. But while popular opinion suggests that there is nothing wrong with playing Bach on the piano, everything feels right about playing his music on the harpsichord.

Even Gould recognised the limits of Bach on the piano. When he recorded the Well-Tempered Clavier, he complained that Bach’s interweaving lines lacked clarity in the muddy mid-range of his piano — ‘the area of the instrument in which a truly independent voice leading is most difficult to establish,’ he said.