Goldberg Variations, Ólafsson, Wigmore Hall review - Bach in the shadow of Beethoven

Víkingur Ólafsson had something to prove at the Wigmore Hall. And prove it he did, even if, this time, his Goldberg Variations left a few features of Bach’s inexhaustible keyboard panorama at the edge of his pianistic picture. The much-loved Icelandic chart-topper had promised Beethoven’s final three sonatas for this concert.

His last-minute reversion to the familiar Goldbergs – which he played on 88 occasions around the world last season after a supremely successful DG recording – had disappointed a portion of his vast fan-base. Besides, the prodigious newcomer Yunchan Lim had just performed the same work at the same venue.

Afterwards, Ólafsson explained himself; that grumbling criticism had clearly struck a nerve. A complex eye operation had impaired his vision when he hoped to prepare the Beethoven. Likeable as ever, he said that he didn’t want the surgeons to employ “period instruments” on him. Then his family had succumbed to a drastic bout of flu, and he had to care for them. Besides, the 30 variations on an aria Bach supposedly wrote to beguile an insomniac diplomat in Saxony constitute a “mirror”. They present us with a different picture every day we gaze into them.

If that sounds like a defiantly Romantic approach to a rigorous set of keyboard exercises written for the two-manual harpsichord and much later repurposed for piano, Ólafsson’s playing emphasised those qualities among the Goldbergs’ many elements. He may not have been playing late Beethoven, but the storm and fire of that turbulent climate swept through quite a few of the musical landscapes here. No piano-based Goldbergs interpretation can be “pure”, but amid this tempestuous brilliance we felt a long way from the contemplative gravity of a Tureck or the delicate restraint of a Schiff. The spectacular arabesques and toccatas came over with a strong, fierce – and often distinctly loud – pre-Romantic virtuosity. They exhibited a dazzling lucidity of articuation, especially in the weight and drive of the left-hand bass parts. A variation such as 14, with its glittering ornament and rhythmic see-saw from hand to hand, pushed forward to Beethoven as much as back to Scarlatti. 

Sometimes I felt that – stung by suggestions that he had taken the easier option – Ólafsson was simply trying a bit too hard. We had muscular, passionate commitment from first to last (at least after a tenderly measured opening aria) but not so much of the dreamy inwardness that fills some numbers with such mysterious solace. Ólafsson, was bright, bold, often rhythmically exhilarating, from the torrential cascades of variation 1 right through to the ferocious trills, runs and chordal stomps of 28 and 29. 

Forget Beethoven: his Goldbergs sounded thrillingly modern, though not at an early-Glenn Gould level of jagged disruptiveness. You heard why great jazz pianists revere them. We had mastery, even majesty, in abundance, with nerveless hand-crossing dexterity that made light work of the trickiest arabesque manoeuvres, but sometimes a certain want of charm – as in the forthright, emphatic gigue of 7.

However, this sporadic sense of strain, and of the pursuit of power over grace, did give way to a broader tonal and emotional palette, especially in the moody G minor variations. The lovely sarabande of 13 saw Ólafsson tap into the wistful, soulful vein that so marked his breakthrough album of Bach pieces (one of my essential lockdown stand-bys). At various points, his finely-judged rubato touches could sprinkle magic over a single phrase. As the solemn canon of 15 yielded to the dashing, Frenchified overture of 16, and then to the exuberant toccata starburst of 17, we felt the work as a journey through altered states of being: an arc Ólafsson has eloquently described, but which seemed to be occluded in his earlier displays. 

In the final quarter, that voyage became an epic trip. In 25, that nine-minute andante dark night of the soul dubbed the “Black Pearl”, Ólafsson reached a kind of Zen zone of enraptured questioning, with the beauty and pain inextricably twisted together. Hunched over the keys, allowing the silence between notes to expand as the harmonies themselves circled slowly around an abyss, he came closer to the Chopin-esque colour and nuance some interpreters have extracted from the Goldbergs. Yet after this spacious, even spaced-out, meditation, he galloped towards the finish. Later pieces sped by not quite in a blur – his pianistic precision never faltered – but a multi-coloured rush, headlong and triumphant. The folk-song heartiness of 30, the quodlibet, had a cheerful, almost relieved, sense of cosy homecoming, although the return of the aria – now truly graceful and serene – gave little impression of fatigue or even resolution. Rather, it hinted that the whole journey might soon start again. 

If some devotees who had expected Beethoven had stayed away, the Wigmore was nonetheless packed with admirers who roared their appreciation, long and loud. After Ólafsson’s little speech – endearingly, he sounded a bit like a schoolboy explaining why he hadn’t turned in the homework assigned – his encore took the comforting form of a lockdown-era favourite, Sigvaldi Kaldalóns’ Ave Maria. The Goldbergs it ain’t, but the gentle prayer reminded me why this artist’s unaffected communicative gift had meant so much, to so many listeners, through those hard days. Beyond the mode of barnstorming heroic pianism he can without doubt now command, let’s hope that – even in the grandest repertoire showpieces – he never lets that go. 

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