Wanda Landowska first performed the Goldberg Variations in May 1933 and she made this recording of them in Paris six months later. Although issued only in a limited HMV Society edition, it created a sensation. As LS points out in the booklet, the masterpiece had not been recorded before and had slumbered for nearly 200 years, known only to musical scholars. In the early years of this century Landowska was not alone in her attempts to rehabilitate the harpsichord, but it was she who re-established it with the public, together with the riches of its repertory and it was she more than anyone who brought the Goldberg Variations back to life. It was a long time since I'd heard her recording and I'd nearly forgotten how impressive it is.
There was nothing Landowska did not know about harpsichord playing and in particular about expressive playing on the harpsichord. More than that, she was a virtuoso with an extraordinary force of personality. Although the personality could be overbearing, she knew exactly what she was doing and there is never a doubt in her account of the Goldberg about her intellectual grip; nor, I think, about her taste, though that might be more disputable. In spite of some weird and not always successful registration schemes, her projection of the work's variety is magnificent. She gives a view of the piece which encompasses its richness and its continuity, and it is only exceptional artists who achieve that. True, the petite reprise of the first eight bars that she tacks on to Vars. 5, 7 and 18 is an idiosyncracy one would rather be without; yet one can accept such moments of caprice as being not entirely inappropriate, perhaps, in a work where a quality of capriciousness on the composer's part is quite often displayed. You may agree that they don't impair our enjoyment of the grand design. Well, only a little.
The sound of the harpsichord Landowska recorded on—an instrument built to her specification by the firm of Pleyel—will be the biggest barrier to listeners now, I dare say. Classic though her account of the Goldberg is in many ways, the noise it makes is anything but. I do not know what interest she had, if any, in the characteristics of the genuine seventeenth- or eighteenth-century article—not that there were many of them about in playing order in her day. In France, of course, where she made her home after the First World War, they had been chopped up for firewood at the Revolution and there was barely one to be seen. We have to remember too that the revival of harpsichord building based on the principles of the old makers was still to come; the players of today take it for granted but it is a comparatively recent phenomenon. I wonder whether Landowska was ever content to amuse herself on a simple instrument with, say, two eight-foot registers, a four-foot and a coupler. Perhaps in private she was: but her inclination as a concert artist, evidently, was to deck out her interpretations with a play of colour and half-lights that was never available to the composers she otherwise served so perceptively. Her Pleyel in full cry is a monster of a machine, as one can hear at the end of the first movement of the Italian Concerto and much of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, and when firing on all six cylinders and driven hard the mechanical clatter is impossible to accept as having anything to do with the world of Bach. Yet, even then, you cannot but admire Landowska for the strength of her convictions. Over the top she may be but, once again, she is sure of her taste. These days her account of the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue may make us wince, but who would argue with her that assertive rhetoric has no place in Bach?
Keith Hardwick has been responsible for the transfers from the old HMV 78s and he can't have had an easy task; the original side-breaks in the Goldberg are perceptible, as you might expect, but the performer's concentration and single-mindedness carry one through. The recording quality varies appreciably, notably in the Italian Concerto between the first movement (fairly horrid and papery) and the rest; but the sound has been digitally remastered and I guess everything possible done for it. The tracks in the Goldberg do not correspond with what is given in the booklet. There are eight of them and numbers 3 to 7, inclusive, begin one variation earlier than itemized.'