The timing has not been fortuitous for pianist Lang Lang and his decision to tackle Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Beginning in 2017, he was waylaid for more than a year by an attack of tendinitis, and no sooner had he returned to action — including asplendid 2019 appearancewith the San Francisco Symphony — than the COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to all live activity.
The waiting finally came to an end on Wednesday, March 30, when the Chinese virtuoso took the stage of Davies Symphony Hall to deliver his highly personal take on this landmark of the keyboard repertoire. And like so much with this willful, extravagantly gifted musician, the results were a slippery mix of the thrilling and the maddening, the deftly stated and the wildly over-the-top.
Lang Lang has always been an artist devoted to extremes. He plays louder and faster, and also slower and softer, than anyone else.
Why? Well, because he can, of course — but also because he genuinely believes that that’s the way to bring life and authority to the familiar classics.
His performances, to this taste at least, often run aground on the shoals of mannerism and exaggeration. Yet there’s a certain weird integrity to them as well, a sense that his aesthetic decisions are based in deliberate consideration rather than merely crowd-pleasing cynicism.
That would have to explain some of the more arcane and sometimes alarming choices Lang Lang made in approaching the Goldberg Variations. The piece is an encyclopedic survey of just about everything Bach knew about writing for the keyboard — which is to say, just about everything there was to know.
It consists of a simple melodic air followed by 30 astoundingly varied treatments of the theme, and not the melody itself but the harmonic progression that underlies it. That gives Bach leeway to pack in all kinds of dances, overtures, lyrical interludes and bursts of rapid-fire virtuosity; every third variation is an elaborate stretch of counterpoint that shows off the composer’s own virtuosity in bending music to his will.
In Lang Lang’s 90-minute account, the most effective stretches came in the movements that were least marked in tempo or mood. He brought simplicity and ease, for example, to Variation 18.
There was an undeniable excitement, too, in the pianist’s intermittent displays of unbridled showmanship. When Bach asks for speedy scales and crisscrossing runs of notes, as in Variations 5 or 11, Lang Lang rose to the challenge with offhanded assurance; the grandiose statements of Variation 16, in the style of a French overture, boasted an undeniable vividness.
At other times, though, the performance lapsed into a vein of bizarre overstatement, particularly when it came to slow tempos. The opening Aria, which is supposed to set the work upon its journey, almost ground to a halt thanks to Lang Lang’s overly deliberate pacing, and the slow Variation 25 — which is often the most luminous segment of any performance — turned into an endless, freakish display of extreme close-ups. Neither movement, nor others like them, displayed any of the rhythmic momentum or expressive phrasing that would have sustained their lengths.
Wednesday’s program, presented by the San Francisco Symphony as part of its Great Performers Series, began with an unbilled curtain-raiser, an athletic account of Robert Schumann’s “Arabesque,” Op. 18, and wound up with an encore, the Chinese folk song “Jasmine Flower.” But Bach, in all his knotty, intractable splendor, remained the focus of the evening.