Bach: Goldberg Variations - David Fray

"Every component of human life is in it - humor, seriousness, grace, dance," is how pianist David Fray describes the masterpiece of Baroque variation art: Johann Sebastian Bach's "Goldberg Variations." The Frenchman now played them in a small Pyrenean chapel near his birthplace. The fact that David Fray was drawn to a place of his childhood for the interpretation of the work is due to the special spatial sound of the chapel, but also to the composition itself. The pianist explains, "When you play the theme again after thirty variations, it's as if you've come to the end of your life and are looking back on it." Bach himself called his Goldberg Variations "changes. They build on each other and increase up to the last ludicrously virtuosic piano pieces, until the original theme returns at the end - and yet seems completely different than at the beginning. David Fray calls this "a sense of eternity". It's an impression Bach may have intended when he composed it; after all, he wrote the variations to cheer up his patron's sleepless nights. A pupil of Bach's, the eponymous Goldberg, then played the pieces to him as needed. In David Fray's discography, old master Johann Sebastian Bach has a high profile. Here, BBC Music Magazine praises Fray's playing as "precisely nuanced, the technical execution aristocratically balanced, producing timbres of irresistibly transparent light and shade." Read more Reviews WDR 5 (11/2021): "David Fray has succeeded in making a recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations that is marked by profundity and subtlety. He demonstrates intellectual sovereignty, the courage to be individual, and stylistic flexibility that never seems arbitrary. A pianistic kaleidoscope with many colorful details that come together to form a convincing whole. Fray once again more than lives up to his reputation as a substantial Bach interpreter. Hopefully we won't have to wait several more years now until his next solo album appears." "It is this mixture of clearly contoured, yet never loud touch, sparing use of pedal, flexible, yet lively varied tempi and an alert sense for the architecture of Bach's number games, which always sound enchantingly melodic here. (...) One is immediately captivated, is once again taken on a Bach journey, the route of which one believes to be reasonably familiar. And yet pleasantly surprising." (Rondo 06/2021) "This album is worthwhile because often-heard music receives fresh creative impulses with David Fray. This album is a listening pleasure because Fray is one of those pianists who can sing on the piano." (BR Klassik, 11.12.21) "David Fray's reading of the Goldberg Variations enriches the huge offering with a tone all its own, worth hearing. Updating musical director's theater of the acceptable, indeed the finest kind." ('Recommendation of the Month' in Fono Forum, February 2022)

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