Product Reviews
Pianist Alexander Gurning, born in Belgium, is of Polish and Indonesian background and has fashionable good looks that work well in the kind of packaging that contains meaningless statements like "For me Bach's music doesn't just talk about his own life, but about all our lives. He reaches out to us. And if we follow him, he shows us ourselves." He has recorded jazz and tango music, and won acclaim in France for a disc of Stravinsky and Debussy. The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, of Bach seem to be a common stop for the path he's on, and indeed this recording likely does what he wants it to do. Gurning manages a Goldberg recording that's just unorthodox enough to stand out without making any major statements about the work. Taking relatively fast tempos, he steers away from the tripartite architecture of the work and treats each variation as an individual entity. He achieves a suggestion of Romantic pianism without mucking up the work with a lot of pedal, dropping in bits of tempo rubato at opportune moments and giving the work a lightly sensitive, sometimes even playful feel. Who's to say that the late 18th century didn't hear it this way? Gurning has good technical equipment along with charisma and flair, and he might be a fresh face who can compete with those coming out of Russia and Germany. ~ James Manheim, Rovi