J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations, Víkingur Ólafsson, piano

Víkingur Ólafsson’s Deutsche Grammophon recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, released in 2023, won the Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo, a genuinely difficult prize to take with one of the most heavily recorded works in the entire piano repertoire. The Goldberg Variations have attracted dozens of studio recordings across harpsichord and piano, several of them treated as landmark or reference accounts, Glenn Gould’s two recordings above all, which means a new version has to earn attention purely through the strength of its playing and interpretive choices, with no novelty of repertoire to lean on.

Structurally, the work is one of Bach’s most rigorously organised: an aria followed by thirty variations built over the same bass line and harmonic structure, grouped in sets of three with every third variation a canon at a progressively widening interval, closing with a quodlibet before the opening aria returns unchanged. That fixed architecture is part of why the piece keeps attracting fresh recordings, the underlying structure never changes, so every interpretive decision a pianist makes about tempo relationships between variations, ornamentation, and the weight given to the canons is thrown into sharp relief against decades of prior recordings.

About Víkingur Ólafsson

Ólafsson, an Icelandic pianist, has built a recording career with Deutsche Grammophon since 2017 around distinctive, sometimes deliberately unusual programming rather than straightforward single-composer recital discs, pairing Philip Glass’s piano music with Bach on one release, and Mozart with a set of his lesser-performed contemporaries on another. That reputation for interpretive curiosity is part of what made a “plain” Goldberg Variations recording, without an unusual pairing or arrangement built around it, a notable move in his own discography: it’s a direct statement about his Bach playing on its own terms, in one of the genre’s most exposed single-composer tests.

About the recording

Unlike a rare or newly commissioned work, a Goldberg Variations recording is judged almost entirely against an existing body of well-known interpretations, which raises the bar for what counts as a genuinely distinctive account rather than a competent one. Winning the Grammy in this category means the recording was heard by voters as bringing something identifiably its own to a work most serious listeners already know in several other versions, a different kind of achievement from a world premiere recording, where there’s no comparable back-catalogue to be judged against.

About the work itself

The Goldberg Variations take their popular name from Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, a harpsichordist in the service of a Russian count who, according to an account first published decades after Bach’s death, commissioned the piece as music to ease the count’s insomnia, a story modern scholarship treats with some scepticism, though it has stuck regardless. What’s not in doubt is the piece’s formal ambition: thirty variations built over the same sixteen-bar bass line and harmonic skeleton as the opening aria, grouped in threes, with every third variation a strict canon at a steadily widening interval, unison, then a second, a third, and so on up through a ninth, before a final quodlibet combining two folk-tune fragments closes the set and the aria returns unchanged to end the work exactly as it began. On piano rather than the harpsichord Bach originally wrote for, decisions about voicing, pedalling, and dynamic shading across that fixed structure become audible in a way they aren’t on the original instrument, which is part of why piano recordings of the piece have generated such a distinct performance tradition of their own since Gould’s first recording in 1955.

A note on this page

This review was written fresh for mmmusic and covers a real, current recording. It isn’t part of the site’s recovered 1991–2018 archive, since the shop closed years before this disc was released. We’ve written it from verified facts about the recording, the performer, and the award it won, extending the kind of coverage the original site gave to notable classical releases to what’s actually being recorded and recognised today.