This live recording
has been sourced from MusicMasters and
preserves Feltsman’s idiosyncratic and
very personalised take on the Goldberg
Variations. Tending not to read
sleeve-notes until I’ve properly begun
to listen to the music I wasn’t quite
expecting the battery of amendments,
emendations, editorial red linings and
other editorialising decisions that
Feltsman codifies in his performance
– or inflicts on the music if you’re
being prescriptive about it. These include
- most obviously – a battery of registral
changes, ornament variance, and voice
switching and as he himself admits in
those booklet notes these will certainly
not be to everyone’s taste. Certainly
he’s not the first pianist to engage
in this kind of licence but the nature
of some of the decisions sometimes does
sound simply bizarre.
Feltsman plays all
the repeats but will often spice them
– as he does in the opening Aria – with
registral changes. His bass voicings
in the first variation are butch – not
crisp – and in the second variation
the twinkling treble registral changes
take on, more and more, the sound of
a musical box. It’s a constant of his
performance, indeed a fetish, and struck
me as less and less intelligent – if
one has to do it at all – the more he
did it. It’s certainly outstayed its
welcome by variation seven where it’s
simply wearying, predictable and – I
think it has to be said – gauche. Variation
eight has a Brahmsian heft to it and
the eleventh variation is a confused
casualty of his voicings; articulation,
colour, and rhythm are all strangely
presented. He seems to want to lay bare
the harmonic implications of Fourteen
but to me it’s interminable. The pugnacious
left hand is back where some cardiac-inducing
ambulance siren articulation nearly
had me down at the infirmary.
The spunky rolled chords
of the Ouverture are at least more recognisable
than the variation that follows it.
Number Twenty-Three sounds strange all
round; Landowska’s Black Pearl is transmuted
into the Long Dark Night of the Soul
– getting on for ten minutes – and in
the final straight the fancy porcelain
music box treble returns with a vengeance.
The gap between the Quodlibet and the
return of the Aria is too long but I
don’t really think it really much matters
by this point.
I appreciate that a
personal response to the variations
is valid in this pluralistic marketplace
but I’m amazed that it didn’t dawn on
Feltsman how vapid, predictable and
silly are some of his re-workings.
Jonathan Woolf
Jens Laurson
also reviewed this disc and found it
more to his taste...review
for details
Vladimir Feltsman (piano) 
