Bach, Beethoven, Rzewski: Goldberg Variations / Diabelli Variations / The People United Will Never Be Defeated!

Igor Levit’s 2015 Sony Classical recording pairs three of the largest variation cycles in the piano repertoire, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and Frederic Rzewski’s 1975 The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, across three discs, and won both Recording of the Year and the Instrumental Award at the 2016 Gramophone Classical Music Awards. It wasn’t Levit’s debut: he’d already released Beethoven’s late sonatas in 2013 and Bach’s six partitas in 2014 for the same label. But this was the recording that brought him substantially wider recognition, in part because of its final, least expected inclusion.

About the programme

Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations are both towering, well-established entries in the variation-form canon, an aria and thirty variations in Bach’s case, thirty-three variations built from a modest waltz theme in Beethoven’s. Pairing them together on a single recording is itself a substantial statement about scale and ambition. What made this release distinctive was the third work: Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, 36 variations on the Chilean protest song “¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!,” associated with Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition before the 1973 coup. It’s an explicitly political piece, rarely programmed alongside the Bach-and-Beethoven core repertoire, and its inclusion here reads as a deliberate argument that the variation form itself connects abstract 18th- and 19th-century keyboard writing to a very different, overtly political late-20th-century American work, treating all three as part of one continuous tradition rather than segregating “serious” repertoire from political music.

About the performer

Igor Levit’s reputation for pairing technical command with genuine intellectual and interpretive ambition was already forming through his first two Sony releases, but this recording is widely cited as his breakthrough. The critic Alex Ross, writing in the New Yorker, described his playing in terms of “technical brilliance, tonal allure, intellectual drive, and an elusive quality that the Germans indicate with the word Innigkeit, or inwardness”, a real, published assessment rather than a general characterisation. Levit has continued to build a career defined partly by exactly this kind of ambitious, sometimes explicitly political programming, of which the Rzewski inclusion here was an early and influential example.

About Rzewski’s variations

Rzewski’s piece is itself built on the same structural logic as its two companions on this disc, a theme stated plainly, then explored across dozens of variations, but pushes the pianistic demands into territory Bach and Beethoven never had to consider: extended techniques including whistling and shouted interjections from the performer, passages of dense tone-clusters, and a level of dynamic and emotional extremity closer to late-Romantic or modernist writing than to the more restrained variation tradition either of the earlier composers worked within. Levit does not soften that extremity to make the three works sit more comfortably together; the contrast between the Rzewski and its two companions is left audible rather than smoothed over, which is part of what made the pairing read as a statement rather than a curiosity.

A note on this page

This is new writing about a real recording, not part of the archive recovered from mmmusic’s original 1991–2018 run, the shop had already closed by the time this record was released. It’s fresh coverage built from independently verified facts about the recording, its reception and its programme, continuing the same factual approach to newer releases.