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PROGRAMME
Liebeslied
Threnody: The Cypresses at the Villa d'Este
The Goldberg Variations
Prelude in C
Sicilienne
Total playing time: 63:37
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The Goldberg Variations began life as a simple dance-tune, a triple-metre Sarabande
which Bach wrote in the musical notebook of his wife Anna Magdalena. Later, he returned
to this innocent piece and made it the basis of the great 30 variations for harpsichord.
As the work unfolds Bach explores a wide range of musical techniques, and in so doing
transcends both compositional expertise and architectural mastery; the result is a
humanitarian masterwork. Busoni's edition of the score enriches and expands many of
the musical textures, making the work sing effectively on the modern piano. I have
taken this process a stage further in several places: the work is now like a house,
built by Bach, decorated by Busoni, furnished with some of my own effects. The resulting
performance happily rejects historical accuracy: nor is it faithful to the elusive 'spirit'
of Bach. Rather, it is based on Bach's own score and some of the performance conventions
of his time, refracted through the high romanticism of Busoni and coloured by a late
20th-century eclecticism.
The final two works are concert encores. The Bach/Rhodes Prelude in C shows a more
light-hearted approach to the art of arrangement, while the Sicilienne by Paradis
expands the chaste textures of the original, and in so doing evokes the 'golden age'
of late 19th-century pianism.
The Liebeslied by Schumann and the Cypresses by Liszt form a contrasting, complementary
pair: music of life, music of death. The tenderness and optimism of young love suffuse
the Liebeslied, in which the lover tells his beloved that to him she is everything -
his life, his soul, his world. Liszt's arrangement of Schumann's vocal original decks
the tender melodies in golden webs of sound. The Threnody by Liszt is a lament for the
passing of life. It opens with the solemn tolling of a great funeral bell and proceeds,
by way of a haunted, visionary melody, to a resolution at once transcendental and
elemental. Liszt wrote it while visiting the Villa d'Este near Rome; its title reminds
us that the cypress tree is a symbol of the entrance to the underworld.
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