Standing ovation for Angela Hewitt’s Goldberg Variations

I have long adored Angela Hewitt’s Hyperion recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations but have never been able to see her perform it live, so when Gerald Finley cancelled their Wigmore lieder recital and Angela pulled out the Goldberg Variations as a substitute, I considered it a happy misfortune.

Once again, a completely packed Wigmore Hall greeted Angela as she strode onstage. Characteristic of her Wigmore concerts, she began by saying a few words about her relationship with the piece, which she is close to celebrating her 50th anniversary of performing (she first performed it when she was only 16!). She closed by saying that the Goldberg Variations leaves both audience and pianist enlightened at the end of the performance, connecting everyone together. She said every time she finished performing the Goldberg she just wanted to embrace everyone in the room.

Indeed, connection with her audience was what made Angela’s performance of this monumental yet completely unpretentious work so incredible. In a great ironic twist, Angela held her audience spellbound for an hour and a half with the piece that was reputedly written to send the insomniac Count Kaiserling to sleep. Under Angela’s fingers, not a single note was superfluous or irrelevant; she seemed to sing with all ten fingers, creating melodies across the keyboard. She herself seemed to explore all the potential of the melodic lines herself, drastically changing the dynamics and colour shading of the phrases on each repeat, shining a new light on them as she did so. In her playing I could see Bach’s magic come alive: he writes music that can show completely different things depending on how you play it; the only way to show that is by infusing the music with one’s own imagination. That’s why something a fan said to her backstage after the concert rang true in my mind: Angela’s Bach playing is at once very much Bach and also very much her own.

Nor did Angela forget that, for all its musical richness, the Goldberg Variations is very much a fun piece, a playful exploration of all the possibilities of the variation form. It was delightful to see her hands chasing each other up and down the keyboard, sometimes crossing over each other. At times it seemed to me Angela even forgot herself in all the fun she was having, indulging in the act of piano playing with an almost childlike enthusiasm.

Amidst all the joy and excitement Bach inserts three variations in G minor, the last one being the most heart-wrenching. Words fail me to describe how fragile and heartbreaking Angela made this music sound. At times it hung in the air like a brief glimpse of the ineffable, divinely beautiful in its transience and fragility; at times it plunged into the most human and dissonant sorrow with utter desperation. She really played her heart out in that 25th Variation.

Nothing can quite prepare you for the feeling when the simple Aria returns after the gloriously messy potpourri of tunes in the final variation which Bach titled “quodlibet” (whatever you like). The simplicity of the original theme is so overwhelming you could cry. All the mirth, celebrations and sorrow of the previous variations fall away and you are left with this simple theme that began it all, yet you cannot help but see it in a totally transformed way. Everything becomes retrospective and you realize that you have just experienced life itself; that the Variations isn’t just a view on life, but is life itself. It is exactly what Angela had said an hour and a half ago; it was a shared experience of enlightenment.

Angela stayed still for almost two minutes after the final note sounded, and the hall, with more than five hundred people in it, was completely silent. There was something so wonderful about this collective holding of breath in order not to let go of the music, not to forget what had just happened. And then the hall erupted into applause and you are once again brought back to reality and to the awareness of all the people around you.

In her performance of the Goldberg Variations, I felt intensely Angela’s joy in sharing music with others, the need to communicate her love for music, and that’s something rare and precious one doesn’t always experience in concerts. It was a spiritually rejuvenating experience. I didn’t realize how much I needed it.

Article featured image credits to Wigmore Hall.