The pianist’s clarity and dexterity brings humour and insights to Beethoven’s contradictory colossus of a work It has taken until now for Mitsuko Uchida to lay down a recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli ...

What makes Bach's Goldberg Variations tick? Pianist Jeremy Denk has a few ideas. From the comfort of his living room piano, he reveals how Bach's musical DNA — a simple strand of bass notes — is ...

But the theme, 20 short variations and coda bulge with so much rhythmic and coloristic appeal that it's hard to imagine the music seemed so forbidding at its premiere. Ax gave Copland's explosion of ...

For years, critics considered Glenn Gould's interpretation of "The Goldberg Variations" by Johann Sebastian Bach to be the gold standard. Now, there's a new contender. With Serena Altschul, we take ...

"A musical mystery. Sir Edward Elgar's 'Enigma Variations' have confounded music scholars and music fans since its premiere. Elgar tells us that the theme is never actually played during the piece. So ...

In the decades since Glenn Gould’s revolutionary 1955 recording, Bach’s Goldberg Variations have gone from an esoteric object of specialist interest to a ubiquitous rite of passage. Pianists today ...

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 ...