The star Icelandic pianist is having an extraordinary year – recording, and now performing, Bach’s monumental work 88 times around the world. He explains why it gripped his imagination, and pushed him ...

J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” begins with a song, an aria, which is wistful, haunting, beyond beautiful. It’s all right there in the notes. Yet the pianist Simone Dinnerstein does something very ...

Chinese pianist Lang Lang went from being just one more fresh-faced and precocious teenaged phenomenon twenty years ago with his debut recording on Telarc, Lang Lang (2001), featuring the heady ...

Owing to its Himalayan presence, Bach’s set of 30 keyboard variations is a daunting prospect for any recording artist. Lindsay Kemp speaks to Lang Lang – whose first recording of the work has just ...

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Jane Jones explores ‘Music which rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.’ I was captivated by these words from the legendary Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, re-cycling a quote from Beaudelaire ...

Chinese pianist Lang Lang may have been playing J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations for close to three decades, but it was only this year that he felt confident enough to make a recording of the work – ...

Bach's towering keyboard masterpiece, by turns obsessive and joyous, is one of the most notoriously difficult pieces to grapple with. So why do pianists keep feeling its lure? I stopped watching ...

Count Keyserlingk, the insomniac Russian ambassador to the Kingdom of Saxony for whom Johann Sebastian Bach may have written the Goldberg Variations, supposedly rewarded the composer with a golden ...