Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: Aria

The opening Aria of Bach's Goldberg Variations is thirty-two bars of sarabande that contains, in its two voices, something approaching the entire emotional range of music: patience, longing, formal beauty, the sense of something ancient and precisely understood. Lang Lang's approach is unhurried and deeply individual — his touch on this recording is warmer and more personally expressive than historically informed performance tradition might prefer, and that willingness to bring himself into the music is either the point or the complication depending on what the listener brings. The ornaments fall with the naturalness of breath rather than the precision of mechanics. The Aria is the frame through which all thirty variations pass before it returns, unchanged in notes but transformed by everything that has occurred between its appearances, and Lang Lang's reading of it understands this structural truth — he plays it as arrival and departure simultaneously. The bass line's inexorable, gentle descent beneath the melodic tracery creates the particular Bach feeling of inevitability held in constant dialogue with freedom. Culturally, this work has been associated with Glenn Gould's twice-recorded interpretation so thoroughly that any subsequent version is in conversation with that shadow. Best listened to in complete stillness, alone, at a time when the mind is prepared to receive rather than produce.