Lang Lang says that he has been playing Bach's Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, from memory since he was a teenager. He's studied the work along the way and points unexpectedly to Nikolaus Harnoncourt and fortepianist Andreas Staier as figures who shaped his conception of the music, but he waited until age 38 to record the work, in 2020. The results are entirely original, and yet somehow along the lines of what one might expect. Lang's treatment is brilliant, charismatic, and quite extreme, with the slow 25th variation coming in at over ten minutes in both performances on the deluxe edition, while other variations are speeded up and emphasize Lang's skill in pure passagework. This leads one to the most distinctive feature of this release, one that may well be unprecedented: the deluxe edition includes two Lang performances of the Goldbergs, one recorded in the Berlin Jesus-Christus-Kirche, and the other live at Bach's Thomaskirche in Leipzig. What's striking is that the two performances, although both recognizably Lang's work, are different at almost every turn. Start right in and sample the opening movements, which diverge considerably in tempo, but each reading is coherent and flowing. Lang knows the work well enough that he can produce two entirely diverse readings as if they emerged organically from his thoughts. This familiarity extends down to smaller details: a distinctive feature of his readings is that midway through a variation, he may choose to emphasize an internal line in the counterpoint. He has the chops, of course, to pull this off elegantly, even if it's not in the music. So this is in many ways work typical of Lang Lang, but his total internalization of the music and his multiple realizations of what he has internalized command respect, even if not necessarily agreement. Deutsche Grammophon's Berlin sound is excellent, but the Thomaskirche recording fuzzes the audience noise of a Leipzig winter night into a sort of low-level background, with less than satisfactory results.
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