0 Bach Goldberg Variations, BWV988. Rosalyn Tureck (pf).

DG CD 459 599-2GH2 (two discs: 91 minutes: DDD).

Forty years ago, when Rosalyn Tureck recorded the Goldberg Variations on two LPs for HMV (2/58), performances in public either by harpsichordists or pianists at the technical and musical level Tureck consistently attained were as rare as hen's teeth. It was a time when, in this country, to hear a harpsichordist having a shot at the Goldberg was considered a treat, and the passages — not infrequent — when the player seemed to be having trouble with some barbed wire had to be accepted as par for the course. George Malcolm was better, Return to a masterpiece: Mikhail Pletnev finds much to say in this, his second recording of Liszt's B minor Sonata PhotoDCGIRayat sound-mass, and Pletnev's occasionally brittle tone works against the music's almost geological accumulation of force. A touch more evenness to the tremolo playing would also give the performance a luminescence it lacks in the upper range. A quirky reading of Gnomenreigen, giving it a strangely grim humour, and a powerful traversal of the 'Funerailles', fills out the recording. Dedicated Lisztians will be happier with more conventionally romantic performances -Bolet or Horowitz. Fans of Pletnev's sinewy keyboard determination will find much to please them. Philip Kennicott of course, but with him too one was obliged to accept the weird and wonderful modern instruments that harpsichordists considered then to be the only ones suitable for concerts and recording. For the public, and certainly for the record-buying public, the Goldberg Variations were still in deep sleep.

In her 84th year, 40 years on, Tureck has recorded the work again. The world of Bach performance meanwhile has changed. It would be wrong to suggest she hasn't changed with it but what was striking and specially admirable then calls these days for less notice. The precision of her articulation and her superfine control of part