Andras Schiff's achievement here was enough to convince George Malcolm, writing in the booklet, that the Goldberg Variations could, after all, be played effectively on the piano. The playing is indeed exceptional, and on CD the sound is splendid (Kingsway Hall, 1982), with an ideal balance of warmth and clarity. Schiff takes all the repeats; the frills he adds to the second times of Var. 1 (and before that even to the Aria itself) made me concerned for the taste of what was to follow, but I needn't have worried: the performance offers more wit, fantasy and sheer fun than any I've heard but it is not frivolous. In one or two of the variations Schiff plays at being a harpsichord and takes the second times up (and in Var. 18 down) an octave. Well, he makes you listen and I like his grace and lightness. It was, I take it, his idea to articulate the work in large spans, five variations at a time, though some of his structural pauses, at these points and others, seem to me too long.
Trevor Pinnock (Archiv Produktion), on a seventeenth-century harpsichord, is concerned to achieve a more sustained continuity, which is more to my taste; the CD gives you the possibility of 'spotting' any variation you wish, not just groups of them, but it is the kind of performance which picks you up at the beginning and brooks no interruption until the end. It is shorter, playing for just under an hour, and there are no repeats in the statements of the Aria or in 13 of the variations. The Ruckers (in the collection of the Paris Conservatoire) sounds well and I agree with LS, who described Pinnock's account of the Goldberg—one or two reservations apart—as pure pleasure.'