Introduction to Goldberg in Motion

… Without Beginning and Without End …

Bach’s Goldberg Variations have always occupied a place of exceptional importance and are regarded by pianists as one of the great tests of both technical mastery and interpretative insight. Their challenge lies in illuminating the work from within: in navigating, as though along a narrow ridge, the vast arc of the composition, from its point of departure to its return to an almost transcendent stillness.

It is a journey towards an extraordinary concentration of inner and outer complexity, a sense of all-encompassing coherence and unity. From the most economical musical means emerges an astonishing wealth of expression, an unfolding of the work’s innermost musical ideas with extraordinary subtlety, vitality and colour.

It is a form of musical exploration that finds its richness not in unnecessary doubling or decorative effects, but in the work’s firmly established inner discipline and order. A profound inwardness, a lyricism both intimate and expansive, gives the Goldberg Variations their unique character – and makes them so extraordinarily demanding.

They form a universe of immense complexity, an Alpha and Omega of music itself. And yet the music seems to emerge from nothingness, only to dissolve into it once more, as though suspended in a state of timelessness …