Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

The best recordings of the Goldberg Variations

The Goldbergs are a nightmare for pianists and only very few have managed to its sense of virtuosic fun without tripping up

Glenn Gould records the Goldberg Variations in 1955 in a converted Presbyterian church on East 30th Street, Manhattan. Photo: Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images

I sometimes think the classical record industry would collapse if it weren’t for the Goldberg Variations. Every month brings more recordings of Bach’s monumental, compact and rhapsodic keyboard masterpiece. And that’s impressive, given that nowhere else does the composer demand such sustained technical brilliance from the performer, who must execute dizzying scales and trills that wouldn’t sound out of place in one of Liszt’s fantasies.

If the Goldberg Variations are an ordeal for harpsichordists, they’re a bloody nightmare for pianists, because they have to tackle music written for two manuals on just one. Their fingers tumble perilously over each other; it looks a bit like high-speed knitting. When the 22-year-old Canadian prodigy Glenn Gould — already dosed up on the barbiturates that would shorten his life —shuffled into Columbia’s studios to record the Goldbergs in 1955, there wasn’t a single piano performance in the catalogue. (Claudio Arrau’s 1942 recording didn’t see the light of day for decades.) I imagine big-name pianists thumbing through the 30 variations and thinking: ‘Nah. Too much work for too little reward’ — and then wincing when Gould’s Goldbergs became the bestselling piano record of all time.

Nowhere else does Bach demand such sustained technical brilliance from the performer

Now we have access to about 300 recordings, and the number is growing all the time. This year, three Goldbergs were released on the same day, 27 August. Quite a few of these are self-financed, so we can’t assume there’s unlimited public appetite for new Goldberg Variations. But tickets to live performances — still comparatively rare, thanks to the risk of finger-collision — usually sell out quickly.

There’s only one musical experience comparable to it: Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations. Posterity has never decided which work is greater, but there’s a consensus that no standalone set of variations written after Beethoven — solo, chamber or orchestral — approaches them in stature.

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