Simone Dinnerstein - Bach: Goldberg Variations
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Free Music Notes for Bach: Goldberg Variations
Free Music Review: a bach machine?
Hit: 3 Stars
I've heard a lot of GV's in my time. . . this is neither the best nor the worst. My chief criticism is of the somewhat eccentric tempo: The aria and some variations are very very slow, other variations are very very fast and sound almost machine produced. I wonder if some of the animosity towards this recording was caused by the fact that Oprah liked it. We GV fans tend to be snobs.Free Music Review: Disappointing
Hit: 3 Stars
I bought it and was disappointed. Dinnerstein's "Goldberg" never came to life for me. It seemed slow, lethargic and dull. Obviously it's a matter of personal taste. And no, I don't like Gould's hyper approach with all of the extraneous background humming and singing. How about Peraiha? That's the one for me.Free Music Review: A Muzak-al Offering
Hit: 2 Stars
Amazon editorial review Thomas May starts out, "This is destined to be one of the best-remembered and significant classical releases of 2007," and then goes on to say, "Within a classical-music circuit increasingly unwilling to take artistic risks, hers has been the rare success story." How is releasing yet another recording of the Goldberg Variations taking an artistic risk? And why is this timid recording destined to be one of the best-remembered and significant classical releases? What's significant about another clone playing bland Bach? Dinnerstein has no personality whatsoever, and in a blindfold test, without the hype of marketing, I doubt the people praising this recording could distinguish her from any university clone. In some of the variations she even sounds a little over her head: in #5 she sounds tentative in a few spots--listen to her right hand lose the rhythm momentarily and then quickly recover at 43 seconds in. It's not an exprssive technique either because in the recap at 1:04 she pulls it off correctly. The "Black Pearl" variation that May is so taken with is to me very ordinary. I agree with reviewer Bill in Eastern Massachusetts, who says there's insufficient differentiation among the variations. They are all very middle-of-the-road in terms of tempo, accent, etc.. Her touch is uniform throughout. Despite what May says, there's no "cumulative effect" at the end. I put this on in the car without a word to my wife and after a while she said, "This would make good brunch music." It would. I'd play this when my inlaws came over. There are no emotional highs and emotional lows; you can talk through it and not feel like you're missing anything. Most astonishingly, Ms. Dinnerstein says she normally plays *all* the repeats, making her performance clock in at close to 90 minutes (too long for disc). The mind boggles. At 78 minutes, this disc felt like six hours. I've sat through shorter Wagner operas.
I can only guess this is getting unusual attention (for a classical CD) because it was recommended by the reigning queen of middle-class taste, Oprah. I would recommend Rosalyn Tureck, Andrei Gavrilov, Gould in any of his recordings, and especially the extremely neglected and brilliant Maria Tipo in a supercheap EMI boxed set (five CDs for under twenty dollars here on Amazon).
Free Music Review: Gouldberg Variations gone bad
Hit: 2 Stars
Fortunately for Dinnerstein, she looks nice and she got the attention of Oprah. My own preference is still for the hunched-over Gould in his sawed-off chair. Allow me, therefore, to venture a short, apocryphal comparison with the master.
Dinnerstein's use of the pedal is distracting and renders mushy the contrapuntal, percussive thrust of the piece. Bach was primarily a composer of choral works, and the Goldberg Variations are choral, too, in the sense that they counterpose two very distinct voices in a complex duet. Dinnerstein seems oddly unaware of the masterful beauty of this conversational, sometimes acrimonious and boisterous interplay, in contrast to Gould, who possessed two minds (and probably more), each pursuing its own path, sometimes in harmony, sometimes disharmoniously, with the other.
Some of Dinnerstein's interprations are simply strange. Variation 28 sounds like dinner music, no pun intended, or a starry bedtime meddly for infants. Such airiness may not be such a bad thing if one takes as true the legend that Bach wrote the Variations as a cure for an aristocrat's insomnia (the account is doubtful, in any case).
And what's happening in Variation 26? The right hand glistens along at great haste but with no character, while the left hand simply mumbles. Here, Gould brought in a regal, march-like antidote to the hyperventilation in the other hand.
Enough said. I wish I could return this CD.
Free Music Review: Not equal to the hype
Hit: 2 Stars
I've heard and appreciated so many performances of the Goldbergs, from Landowska to Hantai, from Gould to Tipo and Schiff. One thing in common with all the really satisfying versions I know is a sense of journey and pacing, a sense that the artist knows where they are taking us. This is often felt at the arrival of Variation 25, an important signpost on the way "home." When set up effectively, it is a profound experience, the still heart of the piece. Simone Dinnerstein, however, has by this juncture allotted so much time to underdifferentiated meandering that the "black pearl" (as Landowska called it) feels like just another in a line of slow, melancholy pavanes. One hates to add more cynicism to this world, but the pretty face on the cover, along with the "inspiring" back-story, would seem to be what places this release in Oprah's Record club.