My quest to record the Goldberg Variations continues. I'm about to begin work on Variation 9, having started from Variation 30 and working backwards. The work is going slowly, but there's no hurry.
Each variation seems to have its own special "thing" that needs extra work. Variation 16, the French Ouverture, for instance, has at least two issues to be considered. One is over-dotting. By convention, in this music, a dotted note is held longer than the written value, and the short note following is correspondingly shorter. Here's the question: sometimes the right and left hands both have dotted rhythms at the same time, with different written lengths of the dotted note, and different written lengths of the following shorter value. Here's an example, from the first edition published by Balthasar Schmid:
In the first measure, the right hand has a dotted quarter followed by an eighth note; the left hand, on the second beat, has a dotted eighth note followed by a sixteenth note. Should the eighth note in the right hand be played as written, or should it be shortened to the same value as the sixteenth note in the left hand? A similar situation appears in the second bar, where the left hand has a dotted quarter followed by an eighth note, and the right hand, on the second beat, has a dotted eighth followed by a sixteenth.
I've heard it done both ways, but in this recording I'm choosing to over-dot the quarter notes, and play the eighth notes that follow them as sixteenth notes.
Another issue with this variation has to do with the ornaments in the second section. Here's the Schmid edition:
In the second measure after the double bar, the turn appears on the first eighth note, not the second, and that is where I'm playing it.
In Variation 13, I'm thinking a lot about phrasing and fingering. Originally I'd been playing things mostly legato, but I've discovered it helps to break the right hand into shorter groups, and play some parts of the left hand somewhat detached, especially the last three eighth notes of the bar in the lower voice. Endurance is also a concern; the right hand needs occasional moments to rest from the flowery ornamentation, more so in my case because of the spring-loaded keys. Where can the line breathe?Variation 12, the Canon at the Fourth, is one of my favorites. Here the relationships between the voices are the focus, as they feed into each other, alternately singing out and accompanying.
Variation 11 has been one of the toughest, largely because of choreography and fingering. The hands often overlap, and it's necessary to decide exactly which hand plays what when. Slow practice is the key here.
The ornaments in Variation 10 have needed some TLC. When one hand plays two voices at once, and one of those voices has a trill, with or without a termination or a lead-in, some decisions have to be made. How many repetitions will the trill have? Will the notes in the other voice be held through the ornament, or cut short at some point? Which fingers will do what? Will repetitions of the Fughetta subject be ornamented the same way as the original, or will they be different?
One way or another, I'm learning a lot with this project!