Bach: Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (Tharaud)

So there’s 2 big problems you face when playing the Goldberg Variations. The first has to do with structure. The GV has structure at three levels. On the smallest level, there’s each individual variation – they don’t all internally climax at the same point, and there’s always the issue of whether repeats are taken, and how the music will be varied if repeated. On a second, larger level, the 30 variations here come in 10 groups of 3 – each group contains one virtuoso (“toccata”/“arabesque”) variation, one character piece, and one (fairly) strict canon, with the canons presented in a sequence of increasing intervals. (The virtuoso variation and character piece switch places in the first group of 3, but otherwise the character piece comes first.) But on top of this almost fanatically rigid structure (broken only by the last variation), there is a third, much freer one – in which the GV reaches an obvious climax in the French Overture () marking the halfway point of the piece, reaches an inverse pe