As a prelude to the 2022 Bach Festival, András Schiff played Wednesday at the Maison symphonique the Goldberg Variations of Bach. As with the pianist’s previous appearances, the evening did not quite resemble an ordinary concert.
The meeting had been eagerly awaited for years by the person who had taken the initiative: Alexandra Scheibler, founder and artistic director of the Montreal Bach Festival. She makes it a point of honor to program the Goldberg Variations during each edition, or almost, but the one she wanted to attract to Montreal for this was on the stage of the Maison symphonique on October 5, 2022.
Frozen audience
First remark: the public was not there by chance. Other than two notorious, paired cacochymes (a dry cough and a wet cough) at the back of the floor, who hadn’t grasped the newly coined concept of “observance of respiratory etiquette”, the silence from the audience was almost unreal. .
This concentration was forced in a certain way and in an almost hypnotic way by an artist who throws away the ritual of the concert where a pianist comes on stage to play what is inscribed in a program. Schiff likes to arrange things and add to a canvas what he wants, which he did not hesitate to do by considerably lengthening the first part after the Italian Concerto with the Suite in a French flavor BWV 831 which features a large Aperture followed by numerous small chiseled miniatures. These initiatives allow him to immerse himself more in the music, but also to cut the audience off from his daily life before approaching the piece of choice of the evening.
It is important to emphasize that unlike almost all pianists who take the Goldberg to their repertoire for a season and tour with them all over the world (Alexandre Tharaud, Beatrice Rana, Lang Lang did this at the time of or after their recording) before not touching it anymore, András Schiff is not on a “tour of Goldberg “. He plays them twice this season, in Montreal and Vancouver, to, in a way, keep them in his fingers, like a kind of musical hygiene.
The mystery of staccato
We are therefore far from a process of tireless “reproduction”, but on the contrary in the presentation of a work integrated into an aesthetic system and a musical thought developed over a lifetime. It can therefore happen that something at some point escapes a little from its frame, on the level of the fingers, like Variation 5. But what matters is elsewhere.
Faced with a great journey that grips us to such an extent, we first wonder what is so out of the ordinary in the approach and the game. The first element, palpable from the Italian Concertois the art of balancing the voices, very evenly, but without “pounding” the countermelody with the left hand and preserving a fluidity that often defies common sense.
The second element, which is not easy to define, is a kind of hemmed staccato which nourishes the sound aesthetic and removes any feeling of harshness from the playing. This brings András Schiff on the keyboard closer to the direction of Carlo Maria Giulini in the Mass in B, which did not require any staccato because one does not pray jerkily. Obviously we cannot play the Goldberg legato, but part of the Schiff mystery lies in the gentle firmness of his articulation.
It would be necessary to be able to film and hoard the concerts of this pianist in order to be able to meditate on them, because they are thought (“ durchgedacht in German), a thought that we grasp when it’s easy (Schiff is one of the few to do Quodlibet — ultimate Variation 30 — the moment of humor required), but which sometimes overwhelms us or grips us so much that we would like to hear it again, just to see if we haven’t dreamed (the liquidity of Variation 28).
Great moment, obviously, as we want more. The pianist is welcome whenever he wants in Montreal and surroundings!