Rosalyn Tureck has made a name for herself as “The High Priestess of Bach”, which is understandable to the extent that listening to her new recording of the Goldberg Variations entails a major sacrifice–of time. Tureck’s performance is very slow, a little more than 90 minutes, and DG has offered the work at two discs for the price of one. This is not to suggest that the performance is bad; in many ways Tureck is fascinating. She reveals the inner workings of Bach’s counterpoint like no one else (except maybe Glenn Gould, but then he’s twice as fast–so you can’t hear as much of it), and she frequently varies her touch on the repeats so as to emphasize first one hand, then the other. Still, she fails to capture much of the work’s lightness, as well as its sheer technical brilliance, qualities much more in evidence on her still available VAI recording (which fits onto a single CD, though some of the repeats are missing). Her performance is worth hearing, then, but not in preference to Gould (to stick with piano versions only), or any number of versions employing a harpsichord. This priestess needs to get out of the temple more often.
