Goldberg-Variationen (Landowska) (1987)

"In 1933 Wanda Landowska made the first recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a work that must have been as new to listeners then as it in fact was to Landowska. While Landowska preferred her best-selling 1945 RCA Victor remake, I lean toward her younger, more pliable, bouncier self. True, modern notions of what constitutes stylish Bach keyboard playing are worlds apart from Landowska’s subjective, rhetorical style, abetted by her trusty iron-frame Pleyel harpsichord with its technicolored registrations. It doesn’t matter. She imbues each variation with pinpointed phrasing and a dead-centered rhythmic sense that jazz musicians would appreciate. I like how she reprises the first eight bars of Nos. 5, 7, and 18 at the finish of those respective variations. The way Landowska times and spaces the spread chords and freefalling runs in the Chromatic Fantasy is chillingly calculated, yet sounds improvised". (classicstoday.com)