This recording is a wonderful,enjoyable performance of the Goldberg Variations, BUT-it is unlikely that Bach would have performed it this way. The slight rubatos and other liberties that Schiff takes are pretty and beautiful, but not written in the score. Last night in Herbst Theatre, (SFP) presented the last of the three recitals in its, designed to introduce audiences to rising talents. The program consisted entirely of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 988 set of 30 (“Goldberg”) variations on an aria theme, a sarabande that can be found in the so-called Notebook for Anna Magdalena Bach. Cepstral allison. ![]() The recitalist was was Italian pianist Beatrice Rana, making her San Francisco debut. This was the music that constituted Rana’s for Warner Classics, which was released this past February. This then brings us to the second shortcoming, which was that Rana gave surprisingly little attention to establishing awareness that most of the variations (not to mention the aria itself) involved the interplay of only two or three voices. This was particularly evident in the nine canons that occur in all of the variations whose numbers are integer multiples of three. Even the most sympathetic listener would have had considerable difficulty in sorting out which voices were in play at which times. All too often it seemed as if all that mattered where such clearly contrapuntal writing was involved was that the counterpoint provided a texture from which thematic motifs would occur and recur, usually in different registers, as the piece progressed. What all of those challenges have in common is that they involve syntax. We all know what it is like when someone who does not know a language tries to read it out loud. Diablo serial number. Even if the pronunciation is not mangled, lack of any knowledge of syntax entails lack of phrasing, which means that the utterance is unlikely to make very much sense. In training opera singers, Lotfi Mansouri was a stickler for insisting that the vocalist always be able to translate the text of the aria into English. Knowing the syntax of the utterance, even in translation, was critical to the proper execution of the phrasing of the music. However, where a three-part invention is concerned, phrasing is not just a matter of what each of the voices is doing. Syntax applies not only horizontally along the flow of each part but also vertically through the well-formed superposition of those parts. ![]() (One would be hard-pressed to find a “vertical slice” through any part of Bach that was not well-formed!) In other words the grammar is “two-dimensional,” applying as much to simultaneities at any given moment as to the sequencing of each part.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |