The Goldberg Variations, J.S. Bach’s “aria with diverse variations” (1741), is a cultural monument in the same category as Michelangelo’s David or the Mona Lisa. These artworks are admired by experts, but they also live in the popular imagination: both sanctified museum pieces and reproducible cultural commodities. Now, Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has taken on the Goldberg Variations, which he presented at Zellerbach Hall on Saturday afternoon for Cal Performances. His rendition was unorthodox — even provocative — but the performance was an astonishing triumph of keyboard virtuosity and sparkling personality.
The Icelandic musician is the latest in a long line of keyboardists who have put a personal stamp on the Goldbergs. His engagement with the piece is anything but casual. He released a recording on Deutsche Grammophon and dedicated his 2023–2024 season to the work, with 88 performances across six continents. He brought the program to Berkeley after delivering it at Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall on Wednesday.
Ólafsson showed no sign of fatigue or boredom in Saturday’s performance. In certain moments, he treated the piece with spiritual reverence, hunching over the keyboard and even restarting the opening Aria midway through when the serenity of the first attempt was interrupted by the chime of a cellphone. In his spoken remarks, Ólafsson may repeat the inflated cliches of Bach reverence — there was no encore, of course; the Goldberg Variations is a “solar system” unto itself — but his playing was feisty and exuberant, full of adventurous twists and turns.
The pianist is 40, but he has the boyish look of someone half his age, and his musical vigor reminds the listener that, despite the elaborate compositional rigor on display in the Goldbergs, the piece is not just about the abstract organization of notes. It celebrates the tactile felicity of virtuoso keyboard performance and the embodied rhythms of dance.
There is a spontaneity to Ólafsson’s playing; indeed, his live interpretation differed significantly from the one he put down on disc. He has an impressive knack for drawing unexpected melodies from the contrapuntal fabric, and he took advantage of the repeats to play the same music in pointedly different ways. For a piece that risks becoming tiresome — 75 minutes of G major, with only a few excursions into G minor — Ólafsson produced a steady stream of imaginative surprises, a crucial element when interpreting a work that has become so familiar to audiences.
One such surprise came in Variation 14, a rollicking festival of trills and ferocious hand crossings. This movement was rendered with the breakneck enthusiasm that characterized the whole performance, but in the repeat of the second section, Ólafsson played with the tension between duple and triple meter that Bach introduces, treating the left-hand accompaniment in two while hammering spiky offbeats in the right hand in a way that called to mind a Latin American tresillo rhythm. It was a rare moment of pure shock; this daring move does not appear on the studio recording.
The Goldbergs are a challenge, though technique alone is no guarantee of a successful performance. They were written for a harpsichord with two keyboards, so playing them on the piano results in awkward moments as the two hands fight for real estate, not to mention the reams of runs, trills, and arpeggios that still push the limits of what is possible on any keyboard.
But Ólafsson has a superhuman ability to dash off reams of notes while avoiding the stumbling blocks that afflict mere mortals, allowing him to pull off some dazzling tricks. In speedy variations like Nos. 2, 5, and 26 — some of the piece’s black-diamond slopes — he seemed to surpass the record-setting tempos of Glenn Gould in his benchmark 1955 recording.
The energy wasn’t always controlled, and at times, the breakneck tempo got in the way of the musical substance — a sonic equivalent of motion blur. But the high-speed train never careened off the tracks, and as a feat of pianistic execution, the performance was a tour de force.
Such an ambitious approach comes with pitfalls, of course. Ólafsson’s tendency to emphasize single lines in the interweaving texture could undermine the contrapuntal flow for which Bach is so admired. There are often three, four, or five independent melodies running concurrently, and it’s typical for pianists to play with the relative importance of each line. But in this performance, the extreme foregrounding of a particular melody would cause the rest of the texture to blend inchoately into the background, particularly at fast tempos.
A reverberant concert hall didn’t help matters — echoey spaces and fast, intricate music are like oil and water — and the brazen energy of the performance came at the expense of certain subtle but important details. The 30th and final variation, the Quodlibet, which quotes some German folk melodies, was taken at an absurdly fast tempo, and while the pianist highlighted the borrowed material, everything else went by so quickly that it had vanished before you could notice it was there.
Ólafsson is the kind of musician who’s not afraid to break a few eggs to make his omelet, and certain interventions — exaggerated ritardandos at the ends of sections, direct transitions between movements, and a tendency not to observe the genre conventions of movements like Variation 16, a French overture — would rankle purists. But Ólafsson isn’t drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa a la Marcel Duchamp. He is showing that even familiar classics can look very different when viewed in a new light and — even better — taken out from behind the security of protective glass.
