The Goldberg Variations, Right Up Close and Personal
April 27th, 2008 Posted in bach, classical music, shostakovich
We just arrived back from a jaunt down to the city. The main attraction was my girlfriend’s brother’s kickarse piano recital including a Haydn sonata (which I thought had surprising amounts of dissonance, but maybe I’m just getting accustomed to that older stuff) a Shostakovich Prelude and Fugue, and the Mendelssohn Variations Sérieuses.
The main meat of the performance was the Goldberg Variations. This is one of those must-love/must-know-really-well pieces for all serious classical music people. But I don’t know it. Well, I’ve maybe heard it through once before when a friend lent me his Glenn Gould CD, but that’s about it. In general I think theme and variations form is awesome (it can beat up rondo form any day of the week), but it’s often well hard the first times through to put it together. In order to actually hear the variations you kind of need to know the unvaried theme enough to hum it (and mentally fill in the harmonics), or you tend to lose track of things in the variations.
This was definitely in effect yesterday. It wasn’t aided at all by the descriptions of the variations, which are not very descriptive. Take a peak over the extensive list of them on wikipedia. Instead of (relatively) easy to pick up on describers like “presto” they are instead mostly labeled with either “a 1 Clav” or “a 2 Clav”. This only served to confuse me more, as I knew enough score-Italian to suspect that Clav means keyboard. Are some of the variations meant to be played on two pianos?
Well, it turns out that is actually sort of correct, but in this case it’s 2 “manuals” on a harpsichord which as my limited understanding of harpsichord design tells me are multiple keyboards on the same instrument. This means that your hands are less likely to collide. However, on a piano you of course don’t have this luxury and it becomes extra-hard to perform, but he did a totally awesome job of it.
The other descriptive element which became a lot more descriptive after the fact are the labels Canone alla Seconda, alla Terza, etc. which I did manage to deduce were numbers, but did not manage to deduce meant that these were variations based on the major second interval, the interval of a third, and so on. In fact they are specifically in the form of a Canon, which is a form in which there is leading melody that gets followed by various imitating melodies.
If I had known all that I might have had a chance at spotting them as they came at me, but as it was I just basked in the music. Next time I shall be better mentally equipped to parse them all out. The concert still rocked though, despite my ignorance. He is truly an amazing pianist.
(Oh, by the way, if anyone is looking for parking recommendations to get into Manhattan with minimum fuss I can heartily recommend taking the ferry from Port Imperial at Weehawken. It’s $10 a day to park, and there are ferries to Midtown minimally every 20 minutes which take only about 5 minutes to cross. Then there are free buses when you get to 38th street.)
April 28th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Re: the 1 Clav/2 Clav situation. Another angle is that there is a switch inside the harpsichord that allows the player to have both manuals striking at once even if they are just playing on the bottom one. This was the only way they could regulate volume aside from just playing more notes at once.
So 1 Clav might be just one keyboard at once, while 2 Clav would be both plucking the strings at the same time. This takes a little bit of effort, so can’t be done on the fly like the organ. The changes is usually marked at the beginning of a new section. Or so I think. There’s a significant chance that I’m just talking out my ass here.